The show ended with a pantomime, every scene of which I remember. When we went back to the house I repeated it as well as I could by mobilising my sister Nicola, and even little Jamie for a minor part, pressing two little schoolfellows into the service, and with this improvised troop I proposed to treat our parents on the festival of one or the other. Our performance was ruthlessly stopped in the very middle without the slightest respect for dramatic art. Grandfather alone was clamorously delighted with it, for which Aunt Deen reproved him. Reflecting upon the incident, I at last recognised that the plot turned upon a hoodwinked husband. The innocent Nicola had been charged with this part, and under my instructions performed it with wonderful success. But I was forbidden to return to the circus. The little circus queen who had made a single spring from her horse’s back into my imagination was doubtless destined to remain a magnificent and remote memory for me. But grandfather loved the company of artists and unconventional folk. I can see him now at the Café des Navigateurs, taking sides with all the Martinod group against the bourgeois. One day as we were crossing the Market Place he went round the tent to where the waggons were drawn up. “Where are we going, grandfather?” I murmured, with throbbing heart. “I want to get a nearer view of these people.” In fact, he stopped and talked with the men who were smoking their pipes, while the women were preparing the soup or mending clothes. He spoke to them in an unknown tongue, which must have been Italian. This language upon his lips seemed to me simply incomprehensible. He pronounced it almost like the words that we use, only dwelling upon certain syllables and gliding over those that followed. But when those bronzed men spoke their words took on a strange accent, sometimes low and sometimes sharp, like gay music. Were these clowns or acrobats? The Marinetti brothers were absent. To see them there would have filled me with pride. The only important personage whom I seemed to recognise was the rope dancer, and she was somewhat disconcertingly crowned with grey hair, and was sadly repairing a dirty skirt of puffed gauze. I was not aware that its proper name is _tulle_.