uch was Janina up to about the eighteenth year of her life when she
graduated from high school and returned home for good. In her
outward life she quieted down, but inwardly she became even more
restless than before.

With her friend, Helen Walder, ideally beautiful and day dreaming of
the emancipation of woman, she had parted. Helen went to Paris to
study science. Janina had no desire to go, for she didn't feel the
need of any knowledge of an abstract nature. She yearned for
something that would exert a more potent influence upon her
temperament something that would absorb her whole being for all
time.

Men, Janina avoided almost entirely, for they angered her with their
impudence; the women bored her with their everlasting repetition of
gossip, troubles, and intrigues. People in general seemed to keep
aloof from her. All sorts of stories about her, more or less false,
were circulated in the neighborhood.

She was a puzzle to all who knew her. Meanwhile, in her own soul she
was waging a battle with her desires, to which she knew not how to
give a definite form. She asked herself why she lived. She buried
herself in books, but found no comfort there. She felt that she must
find something that would absorb and thrill her entire being, felt
that she would find it sooner or later, but in the meanwhile the
agony of waiting almost drove her mad.

Zielenkiewicz, the owner of a heavily mortgaged village, proposed to
her. Janina laughed outright at him and told him to his face that
she did not intend to pay his debts with her dower.

She had reached her twenty-first year and was beginning to lose
patience, when a commonplace occurrence decided her whole future.

In a nearby town an amateur theatrical was being arranged. Three
one-act plays were selected and the parts had already been assigned,
when there came a hitch: no one wanted to accept the role of Pawlowa
in Blizinski's The March Bachelor.

The dramatic coach insisted on presenting this play, for he wanted
to twit a certain neighbor with it, but none of the ladies would
play the parts of Pawlowa or Eulalia.

Someone proposed that they request Janina Orlowska to take the part
of Pawlowa, for they knew that she dared anything. She accepted it
rather indifferently, and Mrs. Krenska, in whom memories of her
histrionic past had suddenly awakened, induced Orlowski to announce
that an amateur had also been found for the part of Eulalia.

The rehearsals lasted for abo