ly 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, cross-examined 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
both referred to that very afternoon. An