She already knew him well enough and wondered as the thought occurred to her that she had ever loved him.
"Why? Why?" Janina asked herself.
Shame and regret began to fill her at the thought that she had fallen so low and for him. He now appeared to her miserable and common. She 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.