This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER III JOAN RIDES TO WOMANHOOD WHEN at last Joan stood in the padroom--the paddock at the rear of the wide back doors that led into the Big Top--awaiting the call for the number in which was her act, she stared about her at the queer, fantastic figures gathered there under the wide canopy, and felt the strangeness of it all for the first time in her life. She had ridden on the shoulders of some of those clowns when she was a baby. She had clung to the index finger of the woman tumbler who was coming from the arena, and had toddled beside her when she was learning to'walk. That man in the green silk tights, who had just blown her a kiss, was the very man who had taught her to say "bye-bye." All about her was the life she had always known, yet of a sudden it seemed new and strange. For the first time she saw the paint instead of the dear familiar faces beneath it. She glanced down at her own slim figure with its slender limbs and its high, flat, boyish breast. She was wearing yellow to-day, and the gauzy folds of chiffons fell about her like a filtered sunbeam. She had known so much of spangles and gauze, and now she was wondering a little, as she touched the soft cloud that enveloped her, just what gingham and linen would feel like when worn in a box of a house that had red geraniums in all its windows and a wee garden beyond the back door. All about her, like magicians of Arabian Nights, were performers awaiting their numbers. Women in fluffy ballet skirts, or long-trained gowns; men in tights or red riding-jackets and satin knee-breeches; to Joan, looking at them all, they seemed unaccountably strange and unfamiliar. It was just as if she had never seen them before. Had they all changed? Had the entire world changed? Or had only she changed? What ha...