With certain sphinxes, no one but the officials concerned ever knows what they have done, where they have served, what laurels they have gained. It comes out quite by accident that they were in the Crimea, where, like Jack Poyntz in _School_, they were heroes in their own way, though they don't talk about it; or that they performed prodigies of valour in the Indian Mutiny and obtained the Victoria Cross, which they never wear. This kind has at least the merit of being unboastful; keeping their virtues hidden like the temple which the real sphinx held between her paws, and to which only those had access who knew the secret of the way. But though it is hateful to hear a man blowing his own trumpet in season and out of season, yet it is pleasant to know the good deeds of one's neighbours, and to have the power of admiring what is worthy of admiration. Besides, modesty and mystery are not the same things; and there is a mean to be found between the secrecy of a sphinx making riddles of commonplace matters, and the cackle of a hen when she has laid an egg for the family breakfast. The monetary or financial sphinx is one of the oddest of the whole tribe and one of the most mysterious. There are people who live on notoriously small incomes--such as the widows, say, of naval or military men, whose pensions are printed in blue-books and of whose yearly receipts the world can take exact cognizance--yet who dress in velvet and satin, perpetually go about in cabs and hired carriages, and are never without money to spend, though always complaining of poverty. How these financial sphinxes manage surpasses the understanding of every one; and by what royal road they arrive at the power of making two do the work of four is hidden from the ordinary believers in Cocker. You know their ostensible income; indeed, they themselves put it at so much; but they keep up a magnificent appearance on a less sum than that on which you would go shabby and dilapidated. When you ask them how it is done, they answer, 'by management.' Anything can be done by management, they say, by those who have the gift; which you feel to be an utterance of the sphinx--a dark saying the key to which has not yet been forged. You calculate to the best of your ability, and you know that you are sound in your arithmetic; but, do what you will, you can never come to the rule by which five hundred a year can be made to compass the expenditure of a thousand. If you whisper secret supplies, concealed resources, your sphinx will not so much as wink her eyelid. How she contrives to make her ostensible five hundred do the work of a thousand--how she gets velvet and satin for the value of cotton and stuff, and how, though always complaining of poverty, she keeps unfailingly flush of cash--how all this is done is her secret, and she holds it sacred. And you may be quite sure of one thing--it is a secret she will never share with you nor any one else.