None the less I cannot really believe that, if we make patient use of our available knowledge, the Alcestis presents any startling enigma.

Hayle's doings were more often than not an enigma to him.

George Cannon lifted his head with a gesture signifying enigma.

But let the difficulty arise from mere imperfections of language, and the consciousness of having solved an involuntary enigma is scarcely sufficient to reward our pains.

question, query, problem, desideratum, point to be solved, porism^; subject of inquiry, field of inquiry, subject of controversy; point in dispute, matter in dispute; moot point; issue, question at issue; bone of contention &c (discord) 713; plain question, fair question, open question; enigma &c (secret) 533; knotty point &c (difficulty) 704; quodlibet; threshold of an inquiry.

[Lat.]; mystification &c (concealment) 528; latency &c 526; transcendentalism. paradox, oxymoron; riddle, enigma, puzzle &c (secret) 533; diagnus vindice nodus [Lat.]; sealed book; steganography^, freemasonry.

enigma, riddle, puzzle, nut to crack, conundrum, charade, rebus, logogriph^; monogram, anagram; Sphinx; crux criticorum [Lat.].

"This nation is an enigma, whose import no man as yet may fully know.

[Illustration: ENIGMA.

As for the enigma of her marrying him, he never ceased to ponder it.

The baffling, sad enigma of death confronted me in all its terrifying crudity.

Women are capable of putting love aside, like a rich dress, and donning the peignoir of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a way which is an eternal enigma to men....

That, under such disguises, we should consider human beauty as a kind of enigma, or a thing to dispute about, is not surprising; nor even that we should often differ from ourselves, when so much of the outward man is thus made to depend on the shifting humors of some paramount Petronius of the shears.

M. Lontane and all his squad were given peremptory orders to unriddle the enigma.

This laboured and characteristic profession of faith in the mate, though sufficiently intelligible to Wilder, was still a perfect enigma to his female listeners.

The infatuation of men of your profession, in favour of so dangerous and so treacherous an element, is an enigma I never could explain.

As if to find an explanation of the enigma in the deportment of the associates of Wilder, his look sought the persons of Fid and the negro.

The popular belief that he was the inventor of gunpowder had its origin in two passages in his treatise "On the Secret Works of Art and Nature, and on the Nullity of Magic," in one of which he describes some of its qualities, while in the other he apparently conceals its composition under an enigma.

Which one? When Madame Honorine solves that enigma she has made up her mind how to act.

Finally two of the clever-heads penetrated the enigma: mauvaise honte, shynessso long out of the world, so old; perhaps not sure of her welcome.

This man cannot be called an enigma.

CHAPTER III THE ENIGMA OF WATERLOO

IIIThe Enigma of Waterloo

The poets erroneously represent woman as an enigma, a living Sphinx.

Man is a hundred times more of an enigma and a Sphinx.