The Man who Knew too Much by G.K. Chesterton

Harold March and the few who cultivated the friendship of Horne / Fisher, especially if they saw something of him in his own social / setting, were conscious of a certain solitude in his very / sociability. They seemed to be always meeting his relations and / never meeting his family. Perhaps it would be truer to say that they / saw much of his family and nothing of his home. His cousins and / connections ramified like a labyrinth all over the governing class / of Great Britain, and he seemed to be on good, or at least on / good-humored, terms with most of them. For Horne Fisher was / remarkable for a curious impersonal information and interest / touching all sorts of topics, so that one could sometimes fancy that / his culture, like his colorless, fair mustache and pale, drooping / features, had the neutral nature of a chameleon. Anyhow, he could / always get on with viceroys and Cabinet Ministers and all the great / men responsible for great departments, and talk to each of them on / his own subject, on the branch of study with which he was most / seriously concerned. Thus he could converse with the Minister for / War about silkworms, with the Minister of Education about detective / stories, with the Minister of Labor about Limoges enamel, and with / the Minister of Missions and Moral Progress (if that be his correct / title) about the pantomime boys of the last four decades.

And as the first was his first cousin, the second his second cousin, the third / his brother-in-law, and the fourth his uncle by marriage, this / conversational versatility certainly served in one sense to create a / happy family. But March never seemed to get a glimpse of that / domestic interior to which men of the middle classes are accustomed / in their friendships, and which is indeed the foundation of / friendship and love and everything else in any sane and stable / society. He wondered whether Horne Fisher was both an orphan and an / only child.