"That's merely talk! Each one of us could break away from the theater, if we only would," said Wolska quietly. "For me this life is harder than for any of you and I know that if I forsook the stage my lot would be much better, but whenever I think that I shall have to quit the stage some day, so great a fear besets me that it seems as though I should die without it."
"The theater is a slow poisoning, a dying by inches each day!" complained Razowiec.
"Don't you whine, for your sickness comes not from the theater, but from your stomach," remarked Wawrzecki.
"That continual dying and poisoning is, nevertheless, a kind of ecstasy!" began Janina anew.
"Oh, a splendid ecstasy! If you want to call hunger, continual envy, and the inability to live otherwise, an ecstasy!" sneered Rosinska.
"Happy are they who have not fallen a prey to that disease, or escaped it in time" added Razowiec.
"But isn't it better to live and suffer and die in that way, as long as you have art as your goal. A thousand times would I prefer to live that way than to be my husband's servant, the slave of my children, and a household chattel!" exclaimed Janina with a passionate outburst.
Wladek began to declaim with a comical pathos:
"Oh priestess, most elect! To thee, in this temple of art, High altars I'll erect!
"Please forgive me that," continued Wladek. "I myself say that outside of art there is nothing! If it were not for the theater . . ."