"Kotlicki!"
Janina dropped her head and for a while a deep silence reigned in the room. Topolski gazed at her uneasily, while Majkowska had upon her face an indescribably derisive smile.
Janina almost cried out with pain, so repulsive did that name and proposal strike her and after a moment she arose from her chair and said in a determined voice: "No! I will not go to Kotlicki . . . and that which you have proposed to me is insulting and outrageous! Only in the theater can people lose so entirely their moral sense as to persuade others to base acts and purposely push them into the mire of degradation, so that they themselves may profit. You have miscalculated this time, my dear sir! I have not fallen so low as that. What hurts me is that you could think even for a moment that I would agree to go to Kotlicki, to Kotlicki, who is more repulsive to me than the basest reptile!" she cried, carried away by passion.
"Miss Janina! Let us speak it over calmly and sensibly, without getting excited."
"You dare to tell me not to get excited?"
"I must, for you are simply inexperienced; consequently that which I ask of you appears to you as something monstrous, something that will immediately sink you in the mud, dishonor you, and shame you."
"For God's sake, what is it then, if not just that!" Janina cried in amazement.
"Let us stop playing a comedy, let us drop this game of hide-and-seek and look at things as they are and we shall see that I am not proposing anything out of the ordinary to you. What am I asking of you? Merely that you go to Kotlicki for the money which is to be the foundation of our common future, the money which will create our theater for us and without which none of us can budge from Warsaw. So what is there wrong in this? What wrong can there be in that which will make almost all of us happy?"
"What? Is it possible that you do not see any wrong in the fact that I, a woman should go alone to the home of a man? And for what will he give me that one thousand or two thousand rubles?"
"When you lived with Glogowski no one regarded it as wrong. Now, when you are living with Wladek who blames you for it? After all, what is there so dreadfully dishonorable about it? We all live that way; and are we thereby committing anything base? . . . No! for that is a secondary thing, for we have something more important in our minds: art!"