Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/103

 IN THE AVENUE.

to the classic story, the Sphinx demanded of all who visited her the solution of an enigma—and that enigma was Man.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, on a quiet ordinary Sunday morning, Arminell, a young girl without experience, had been confronted with the Sphinx, and set the same enigma, an enigma involving others, like the perforated Chinese puzzle-balls, an enigma that has been essayed and answered repeatedly, yet always remains insoluble, that, as it has assumed fresh aspects, has developed new perplexities. Arminell had been wearied with the routine and restraint of social life, its commonplace duties and conventionalities, and had been fired with that generous though mistaken dislike to the insincerities and formalities of civilisation, so often found among the young—generous, because bred of truth; mistaken, because it ignores the fact that the insincerities impose on no one, and the formalities are made of mutual compromises, such as render life, social life, possible.

Arminell was in this rebellious mood, when she was brought face to face with a problem beyond her powers to unravel. She might as well, with a rudimentary knowledge of algebraic symbols, have been set to work out Euler's proof of the Binomial Theorem. She was like Fatima when she opened Blue-Beard's secret chamber, and saw in it an