g round a circus ring of its own. Could they really be true.
I wondered, all those bewildering things I had heard tell of circuses?
Did long-tailed ponies really walk on their hind-legs and fire off
pistols? Was it humanly possible for clowns to perform one-half of
the bewitching drolleries recorded in history? And how, oh, how dare
I venture to believe that, from off the backs of creamy Arab steeds,
ladies of more than earthly beauty discharged themselves through paper
hoops? No, it was not altogether possible, there must have been some
exaggeration. Still, I would be content with very little, I would take
a low percentage--a very small proportion of the circus myth would more
than satisfy me. But again, even supposing that history were, once in
a way, no liar, could it be that I myself was really fated to look upon
this thing in the flesh and to live through it, to survive the rapture?
No, it was altogether too much. Something was bound to happen, one of us
would develop measles, the world would blow up with a loud explosion.
I must not dare, I must not presume, to entertain the smallest hope. I
must endeavour sternly to think of something else.

Needless to say, I thought, I dreamed of nothing else, day or night.
Waking, I walked arm-in-arm with a clown, and cracked a portentous whip
to the brave music of a band. Sleeping, I pursued--perched astride of a
coal-black horse--a princess all gauze and spangles, who always managed
to keep just one unattainable length ahead. In the early morning Harold
and I, once fully awake, crossexammed each other as to the possibilities
of this or that circus tradition, and exhausted the lore long ere the
first housemaid was stirring. In this state of exaltation we slipped
onward to what promised to be a day of all white days--which brings
me right back to my text, that grown-up people really ought to be more
careful. I had known it could never really be; I had said so to myself a
dozen times. The vision was too sweetly ethereal for embodiment. Yet the
pang of the disillusionment was none the less keen and sickening,
and the pain was as that of a corporeal wound. It seemed strange and
foreboding, when we entered the breakfast-room, not to find everybody
cracking whips, jumping over chairs, and whooping In ecstatic rehearsal
of the wild reality to come. The situation became grim and pallid
indeed, when I caught the expressions "garden-party" and "my mauve
tulle," and realized that they bo