utumn sun that hung over
the park. It seemed to her that she had never passed through them,
never felt anything, never suffered anything. It seemed to her that
she was curling up within herself, growing smaller and shrinking,
like that withered leaf that hung upon the barbed wire of the fence,
all ready to drop and be hurled down into the abyss of death by that
light breath of wind. Then again it seemed to her that she was
ripping to pieces, like that spider web that tangled itself about
the grass and floated in glistening filaments through the air; that
she was unwinding into such gossamer strands, into ever finer and
finer filaments, until she had vanished away into infinity and lost
all consciousness of herself. This feeling moved her strongly and a
strange tenderness and pity for herself filled her heart with
sorrow.

"Poor girl! How unhappy she is!" whispered Janina, as though she was
speaking of some other person.

Janina's soul was so rapidly disintegrating in its agony that she no
longer had a full and clear conception of what the miseries were
that had vanquished her, what misfortunes had broken her, nor did
she know why she was weeping or who she was.

"Death!" she repeated mechanically and that word found a deep and
unconscious echo in her brain and nerves and pressed only a few
tears from her eyes.

She stopped, without knowing why, before the marble figure of the
dancing Faun. The rains had darkened his stony body and rusted the
locks of his hair that curled like hyacinths, and his face, furrowed
by streams of water, seemed to have grown longer since the spring,
but in his eyes there gleamed and burned that same mockery and his
crooked legs continued their mad dance. "Lo! lo! lo!" he seemed to
sing, shaking his flute, laughing and jeering at everything, and
raising boldly to the sun his head which was crowned as though with
a bacchantic wreath by the withered leaves that had fallen on it.

Janina gazed at him, but being unable to remember or understand
anything, she passed on.

On Nowy Swiat, in one of the chambres garnies, she asked for a room,
ink, letter-paper, and envelopes. When everything had been supplied,
Janina locked herself up in the room and wrote two letters: one
brief, dry, and painfully ironical letter to her father and another
longer and entirely calm one to Glogowski. She notified them both of
her suicide. She addressed the letters with the greatest accuracy
and laid them in a cons