Something was coming slowly down the middle of the roadway from amongst the confusion of the distant traffic; an elephant--a large grey elephant. Firmly delicately undisturbed by the noise of the street, the huge crimson gold-braided howdah it carried on its back, and the strange, coloured things coming along behind it, the thickening of people on the pavement and the suddenly increased noise of the town, it came stepping. It was wonderful. “Wise and beautiful! Wise and beautiful!” cried a voice far away in Miriam’s brain. It’s a circus said another voice within her.... He doesn’t know he’s in a circus.... She hurried forward to reach Eve. Eve turned a flushed face. “I _say_; it’s a circus,” said Miriam bitingly. The blare of a band broke out farther up the street. People were jostled against them by a clown who came bounding and leaping his way along the crowded pavement crying incoherent words with a thrilling blatter of laughter. The elephant was close upon them alone in the road space cleared by its swinging walk.... If only everyone would be quiet they could hear the soft padding of its feet. Slowly, gently, modestly it went by followed by a crowd of smaller things; sad-eyed monkeys on horseback in gold coatlets, sullen caged beasts on trolleys drawn by beribboned unblinkered human-looking horses, tall white horses pacing singly by, bearing bobbing princesses and men in masks and cloaks. 5 Here and there in the long sunlit hours of the holiday by the Brighton sea Miriam found the far-away seaside holidays of her childhood. Going out one afternoon with Eve and Miss Stringer walking at Eve’s side, listening to the conversation of the two girls, she had felt when they reached the deserted end of the esplanade and proposed turning round and walking home, an uncontrollable desire to be alone, and had left them, impatiently, without a word of excuse and gone on down the grey stone steps and out among the deserted weed-grown sapphire-pooled chalk hummocks at the foot of the cliffs. For a while she was chased by little phrases from Miss Stringer’s quiet talking--“if you want people to be interested in you, you must be interested in them”; “you can get on with everybody if you make up your mind to”--and by the memory of her well-hung clothes and her quiet regular features spoilt by the nose that Gerald said was old-maidish, and her portmanteau full of finery, unpacked on the first-floor landing outside the tiny room she occupied--piles of underlinen startlingly threaded with ribbons.