and predicted a
brilliant artistic future for him.

It pleased Janina to see him applauded on the stage. And so
skillfully did he know how to exhibit the resources of his brain,
that he was generally taken for an educated man, while in reality he
possessed only cleverness and the brazenness of a Warsaw loafer and
trickster. Moreover, for Janina he was the first and only man to
whom she had ever surrendered herself. It seemed to her that this
bound them for all time and indissolubly.

It happened, as it were, of itself, after one of the rehearsals of
Doctor Robin in which Wladek acted as a substitute in the role of
"Garrick." When they had left the theater he spoke or rather
declaimed to her about love with a volcanic outburst of passion and
accentuated his emotion with such pathos that he stirred her to the
very depths of her soul. She felt sudden tears of tenderness welling
up in her eyes; and a desire for tremendous happiness through life
and death remained in her dreaming heart. Her whole soul was
absorbed in the desire for love.

Janina did not even know what was happening to her, for she could
not resist the fascination of his voice. That musical pleading of
love, those burning kisses, and those passionate glances flooded her
entire being with an overwhelming and mad desire for joy. She
abandoned herself to him with the passiveness of a fascinated
creature, without a word of protest or resistance, but also without
a consciousness of what she was doing; in a word, she was
hypnotized.

She did not even know what it was in him that she loved: the actor
masterfully playing upon her emotions and enthusiasm, or the man.
Janina did not think of this. She loved him because she loved him
and because he personified the theater and art for her.

It seemed to Janina that through his eyes she saw farther and
deeper. Her soul was growing (as the peasants describe certain
stages in the development of youth), so besides her distant plans of
fame in the future, she needed something for herself alone, she
needed to strengthen herself and support herself on some loving
heart which would at the same time serve as a stepping-stone for her
own elevation. She no longer felt lonely, for she could now reveal
to Wladek her most secret thoughts, dreams, and projects for the
future and go over various heroic roles together with him. He was a
sort of physical complement of her, and outlet for her excessive
energy and dreams.

Janina