Then there are sphinxes of a more personal kind--people who keep their affairs a profound secret from every one, who wash all their dirty linen scrupulously at home and double-lock the door of the cupboard where the family skeleton lives. They are dungeons of silence, unfathomable abysses of reserve. You never know more of them, mind nor estate, than what you can learn from the merest outside of things. Look back, and you cannot recollect that you have ever heard them speak of their family or of their early days; and you are not acquainted with a living soul with whom they are connected. You may visit them for years without knowing that such and such a friend is their cousin, or maybe their sister. If they are unmarried men, they have no address save at their club; and neither you nor their most intimate friends have an idea where they sleep. For all you know to the contrary they may be married, with a fine flourishing family snugly stowed away in some suburban villa, where perhaps they live under another name, or with the omission or addition of a title that effectually masks their real individuality. If this is their special manifestation of sphinxhood, they take as many precautions against being identified as a savage when out on a scouting expedition. They obliterate all traces of themselves so soon as they leave their office in the City, and take it as a terrible misfortune if the truth is ever discovered; though there is nothing disgraceful in their circumstances, and their wives and children are healthy and presentable. Most of us have been startled by the sudden discovery, in our own circle of friends, of the wife and children of some member of our society hitherto supposed to be a bachelor and unshackled. All the time that we have been joking him on his celibacy and introducing him to various young ladies likely to make good wives if properly taught, he has been living in the holy estate a little way out of town, where he is at last stumbled on by some OEdipus who tells the secret to all the world and blows the mystery to the winds. We may be very sure that the officious OEdipus in question gets no thanks for his pains, and that the sphinx he has unmasked would rather have gone on living in congenial secrecy with his unacknowledged family in that remote suburban villa, than be forced into publicity and recognition. Leading two lives and personating two men--the one as imagined by his friends, the other as known to his belongings--was a kind of existence he liked infinitely better than the commonplace respectability of being _en évidence_ throughout.