h her hands, for dreams and hallucinations
tormented her even more than hunger.

There was still another thing which made her deathly silent, so that
she would sit for whole hours listening within herself, and thinking
of those strange, indefinable impressions and feelings which
pervaded her ever more frequently. Janina felt that something
dreadful was happening within her, that those sudden fits of
trembling and weeping which would seize her without any explainable
cause, those violently changing moods to which she gave way and
those strange sufferings were somehow unnatural and resulted from
something about which she feared to think. She had no mother, nor
anyone in whom she could confide and who would enlighten her, but
there came a moment when with womanly instinct she knew that she was
about to become a mother.

Janina wept for a long time after that discovery, but her tears were
not tears of despair, but only of tender pity, sensitiveness and
shame at the same time. She felt then that death had crouched behind
her and was standing so close that it sent a shudder of frenzy
through her entire being and cast her into an apathetic
indifference. She ceased to think and surrendered herself passively,
with the fatalism of people who have suffered long or who have been
crushed by some overwhelming misfortune, to the wave that bore her
on and did not even ask whither it was taking her.

One day, unable to endure any longer the sharp pangs of hunger,
Janina began to look around her room for something which she might
sell. She began feverishly to rummage in her trunks. She had only a
few light theatrical costumes.

Sowinska was again reminding her almost every day about her overdue
rent and that daily nagging was an unbearable torment. Janina could
not ask her to sell those costumes, for she knew that Sowinska would
unscrupulously keep the money, so she decided to sell them herself.

She wrapped one of the costumes in a piece of paper and went to the
door to wait for a buyer of old clothes, but the porter was walking
about the yard, servant girls were going to and fro, and in the
windows of the houses she saw the faces of women who had often cast
scornful glances at her. No, she could not sell here, for in a
moment the whole house would know about her poverty. She went to one
of the adjoining houses and waited a short while.

"Any old things to buy! Any old things to buy!" came the hoarse
voice of an old Jew.

Jani