fulness all that was not song, music, and
pleasure.

When the act ended and a storm of applause broke loose, she was on
the verge of fainting. She bent her head and eagerly drank in those
murmurs resembling lightning flashes and, like them blinding the
soul. She breathed in those cries of the delighted public with her
full breath and with all the might of her soul that craved for fame.
She closed her eyes, so that that impression, that picture might
last longer.

The enchanting vision had dissolved. Over the stage moved men in
their shirt sleeves and without vests; they were changing the
scenes, arranging the furniture, fastening the props. She saw the
grimy necks, the dirty and ugly faces, the coarse and hardened hands
and the heavy forms.

She went out on the stage and through a slit in the curtain gazed
out on the dim hall packed full of people. She saw hundreds of young
faces, women's faces, smiling and still stirred by the music, while
their owners fanned themselves; the men in their black evening
clothes formed dark spots scattered at regular intervals, upon the
light background of feminine toilettes.

Janina felt a strange disappointment as she realized that the faces
of the public were very much like those of Grzesikiewicz, her
father, her home acquaintances, the principal of her boarding
school, the professors at the academy and the telegrapher at
Bukowiec. For the moment, it seemed to her that that was a sheer
impossibility. How so? . . . She, of course, knew what to think
about those others, whom long ago she had classified as fools,
light-heads, drunkards, gossipers, silly geese and house-hens; small
and shallow souls, a band of common eaters-of-bread, sunk in the
shallow morass of material existence. And these people that filled
the theater and doled out applause, and whom she had once thought of
as demi-gods were they the same as those others? Janina asked
herself, that, wonderingly.

"Madame!" said a voice beside her.

She tore her face away from the curtain. At her side stood a
handsome, elegantly dressed young man who was holding his hand to
his hat, smiling in a conventional manner.

"Just let me look a moment . . ." he said.

Janina moved away a bit.

He glanced through the slit in the curtain and relinquished her
place to her.

"Pardon me, pardon me for disturbing you . . ." he said.

"Oh, I've looked all I wanted to, sir . . ." she answered.

"Not a very interesting sight, is it? .