She smiled in the mirror with a melancholy look at her yellowish and worn face. She tried to read to rid herself, as it were, of her own personality, but she could not, for she constantly felt that growing hunger.
She gazed out of the window at the long yard surrounded on all sides by the high windows of the adjoining houses, but she saw how in a few houses people were sitting down to the table and saw the workmen in the yard also eating their dinner from small clay pots. She quickly drew back from the window for she felt hunger like a steel hand with sharp claws tearing her even more violently.
"Everybody is eating!" Janina said to herself as though this was the first time that she had taken note of that fact.
Later she lay down and slept until the evening without going either to the rehearsal or to Cabinska's home, but she felt even weaker upon awaking and had a painful dizziness in her head, while that keen and constant sapping sensation within herself tormented her so that she wept.
In the evening in the dressing-room a boisterous gayety possessed Janina; she laughed continually, joked and made fun of her companions quarreled over some trifle with Mimi and then flirted from the stage with the occupants of the front row of seats.
When the counselor appeared behind the scenes right after the first act with a box of candy, Janina greeted him joyously and pressed his hand so tightly that the old man became confused. Afterwards she sat down in some dark corner, waiting for the stage-director to cry: "Enter!" When the darkness and silence enveloped her, she broke into convulsive sobbing.
After the performance Janina received a quadruple payment on account two whole rubles. Cabinski gave them to her himself in secret so that the others might not see it.
Janina went out for supper on the veranda and became intoxicated with one glass of whiskey so that she herself requested Wladek to escort her home.
From that evening Wladek followed her like a shadow and began openly to show her his love, paying no attention to the fact that his mother was asking everybody in the theater about him and constantly tracking both him and Janina.
One day Glogowski came rushing into Janina's home and cried out already from the doorway: "Well, I have come back again to my Zulus! . . ."