g to eat?" Janina asked herself.

From the kitchen there was wafted to her the smell of frying meat.
She shut the door tightly for that smell nauseated her.

Janina remembered with a strange emotion that the majority of great
artists in various ages also suffered poverty and hunger. The
thought consoled her for a while. She felt as though she were
anointed with the first pang of martyrdom for art's sake.

She smiled in the mirror with a melancholy look at her yellowish and
worn face. She tried to read to rid herself, as it were, of her own
personality, but she could not, for she constantly felt that growing
hunger.

She gazed out of the window at the long yard surrounded on all sides
by the high windows of the adjoining houses, but she saw how in a
few houses people were sitting down to the table and saw the workmen
in the yard also eating their dinner from small clay pots. She
quickly drew back from the window for she felt hunger like a steel
hand with sharp claws tearing her even more violently.

"Everybody is eating!" Janina said to herself as though this was the
first time that she had taken note of that fact.

Later she lay down and slept until the evening without going either
to the rehearsal or to Cabinska's home, but she felt even weaker
upon awaking and had a painful dizziness in her head, while that
keen and constant sapping sensation within herself tormented her so
that she wept.

In the evening in the dressing-room a boisterous gayety possessed
Janina; she laughed continually, joked and made fun of her
companions quarreled over some trifle with Mimi and then flirted
from the stage with the occupants of the front row of seats.

When the counselor appeared behind the scenes right after the first
act with a box of candy, Janina greeted him joyously and pressed his
hand so tightly that the old man became confused. Afterwards she sat
down in some dark corner, waiting for the stage-director to cry:
"Enter!" When the darkness and silence enveloped her, she broke into
convulsive sobbing.

After the performance Janina received a quadruple payment on account
two whole rubles. Cabinski gave them to her himself in secret so
that the others might not see it.

Janina went out for supper on the veranda and became intoxicated
with one glass of whiskey so that she herself requested Wladek to
escort her home.

From that evening Wladek followed her like a shadow and began
openly to show her his love, paying no a