could not forgive herself.

"What fatality placed him in my path of life?" Janina asked herself
further. In her own eyes she felt deeply humiliated.

"I did not love him," she pondered and a shudder of disgust shook
her. He began to grow hateful to her.

And the theater also, lost a great deal of its glamor for Janina in
those hours of reflection. She now looked at it through the prism of
those continual quarrels and behind-the-scenes intrigues, through
the vanity of its priests and through her own disappointments.

"It is not as I used to see it formerly!" she lamented.

Everything became increasingly smaller and grayer to Janina's inner
vision. Everywhere she began to discover rags, sham, and falsehood.
People obscured everything for her with their baseness and
pettiness. She no longer desired to reign as a queen upon the stage.

"What is that? What is that?" she whispered to herself and saw a
motley, heterogeneous public that was indifferent to the quality of
a play. It came to the theater to amuse itself and laugh; it
hankered for clownishness and the circus.

"What is that? Comedianism for profit and for the amusement of the
multitude," Janina answered herself. The stage now appeared to her
as a real arena for the feats of clowns and trained monkeys.

"I wanted to be an entertainer of the mob! And where does art come
in? What is pure art, the ideal, for which hundreds of people
sacrifice their lives?"

"What is it and where is it to be found?" she asked herself
uneasily, beginning to see that everything is rather an amusement
than an aim in itself.

Literature, poetry, music, painting, and all the fine arts passed
before Janina's mind. She could not separate their utilitarian
aspect from their purely artistic one. She saw that all artists
played, sang, and created only to amuse that vast, brutal, mob. For
it they sacrificed their lives, their strength, and their dreams;
for it they struggled and suffered, lived and died.

To Janina that vast multitude of Grzesikiewiczs, Kotlickis, and
counselors, appeared in its ignorance and low instincts like a cruel
master who, with a half-mocking, half-favoring smile, looked down
upon that entire human throng of artists that painted, played,
recited, created, and begged with a nervous look for his favor and
recognition.

And she saw one immense wave of human beings spreading over the wide
plains of earth, swaying slowly and going nowhere; and on the other
side a