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love.” So I asked her: “What is this ‘something’, I should like to
know?” “I don’t quite know how to explain,” she replied, “it’s your
voice, your expression, the way you move… Certainly nobody else
has got what you have.”
Naturally, for some time I did not believe her; and I used to
make her repeat these speeches to me. But, as the days went by, I
began, I must admit, to get ideas into my mind. “Suppose it was
really true?” I sometimes said to myself. Why shouldn’t somebody
like me? I was neither a hunchback, a dwarf, an old man or a monster.
About this time Ida and I decided to go and see a circus. We
were both of us feeling very cheerful; and, once inside the big tent,
we took our places in the cheap seats, very close together, arm in arm.
Beside me was a tall, fair woman, young and handsome, and with her,
one seat farther on, a dark young man, big and strong too, a tough,
athletic-looking type. I thought about them ‘a handsome pair’. And
then I gave all my attention to the circus.
Four clowns came in, they cut capers and made jokes, slapping
and kicking each other, and Ida laughed. And then came a family of
trapezists, they clapped their hands and then, up a knotted rope they
climbed, up and up, right to the roof of the tent. There they began to
send the trapezes flying backwards and forwards, hanging on now
with their hands and now with their feet. FIlled with admiration, I
said to Ida: “How I should like to be a trapezist!”
Ida, in her usual way, answered in a tone of adoration: “It’s all
a matter of practice… If you practised, you could do it too.”
The fair woman looked at us and whispered something to her
companion, and they both started laughing.
After the trapezists came the lions. They entered a big nickelled
cage in the middle of the arena, five of them, as well as the lioness
who at once began to roar. Last of all came the lion-tamer, a
ceremonious little man in a green coat, who at once started bowing to
the public. Then he turned towards the lions and by poking them in
the backside with the hook, forced them to climb up on to some little
stools; two or three of them put out a paw in his direction, which he
avoided with a pirouette. Then the trainer went up to one of the lions
which was older than the rest and which looked three-quarter asleep
and was not roaring, opened its mouth and put his head inside.
I said to Ida: “You won’t believe me… but I should just love to
go into that cage and put my head in the lion’s mouth too.” Filled

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