"The child is ill," said my mother.

"He is hysterical," said my father.

I never told them, and they never knew.
Already had I developed reticence concerning this quality of mine, this semi-disassociation of personality as I think I am justified in calling it.
I saw the snake-charmer, and no more of the circus did I see that night.
I was taken home, nervous and overwrought, sick with the invasion of my real life by that other life of my dreams.
I have mentioned my reticence.

Only once did I confide the strangeness of it all to another.

He was a boy--my chum; and we were eight years old.