There was a woman in a steel-built city who had all that money could buy, she had gold and dividends and trains and houses, and she had pets to play with, but she had no sphinx.  
So she besought them to bring her a live sphinx; and therefore they went to the menageries, and then to the forests and the desert places, and yet could find no sphinx.
 
And she would have been content with a little lion but that one was already owned by a woman she knew; so they had to search the world again for a sphinx.
 
And still there was none.
 
But they were not men that it is easy to baffle, and at ............