room.

"I am already settled for good," she later said to the old woman who
dropped in to see her.

"Bosh, it won't be for long! In two months you'll be moving again.
An actor's life is a gypsy life, from wagon to wagon, from town to
town. . . ."

"Perhaps at some time I'll be able to settle down permanently," said
Janina.

Sowinska smiled gloomily. "That is the way one thinks in the
beginning, but afterwards . . . afterwards it ends in eternal
wandering. . . . You become worn-out like a rag and die on a hotel
bed."

"Not all end in that way," answered Janina gaily, paying little
attention.

"What are you laughing at? . . . It's not at all funny!" cried
Sowinska.

"Am I laughing? . . . I merely said that not all end in that way."

"All ought to end in that way, every one of them!" Sowinska shouted
angrily and left.

Janina could not understand either her violent anger, or her last
words.

The days sped on. Janina absorbed the theater into herself ever more
deeply. She attended the rehearsals regularly, afterwards went to
give lessons for two hours to Cabinska's daughter, and later would
go home for dinner, prepare her wardrobe for the performance, and at
about eight in the evening start off again for the theater.

On the days when no operettas were played and the choruses were
free, she went to the Summer Theater and there, squeezed high up in
the gallery, spent entire evenings dreaming. She devoured with her
eyes the actresses, their gestures, costumes, mimicry, and voices.
She followed the action of the plays so closely that later she could
re-create them in her mind with detailed accuracy and often, after
returning from the theater, she would light the candles, stand
before the large mirror, and repeat the acting which she had seen,
observing intently every quiver of her facial expression and trying
out every conceivable pose. But she was seldom satisfied with
herself.

The plays which she saw left her cold and bored. She was not stirred
by the bourgeois dramas with their eternal conventional conflicts
and flirtations. She repeated the banal lines of these plays
apathetically and in the midst of some scene would stop and go to
bed.

She asked Cabinski to give her a role in the cast of a new play, but
he put her off with nothing.

"I am keeping you in mind, but first you must familiarize yourself
with the stage. . . . When we present some melodrama or folk play
you will get a bigger role . . ."