"Death!" she repeated mechanically and that word found a deep and unconscious echo in her brain and nerves and pressed only a few tears from her eyes.
She stopped, without knowing why, before the marble figure of the dancing Faun. The rains had darkened his stony body and rusted the locks of his hair that curled like hyacinths, and his face, furrowed by streams of water, seemed to have grown longer since the spring, but in his eyes there gleamed and burned that same mockery and his crooked legs continued their mad dance. "Lo! lo! lo!" he seemed to sing, shaking his flute, laughing and jeering at everything, and raising boldly to the sun his head which was crowned as though with a bacchantic wreath by the withered leaves that had fallen on it.
Janina gazed at him, but being unable to remember or understand anything, she passed on.
On Nowy Swiat, in one of the chambres garnies, she asked for a room, ink, letter-paper, and envelopes. When everything had been supplied, Janina locked herself up in the room and wrote two letters: one brief, dry, and painfully ironical letter to her father and another longer and entirely calm one to Glogowski. She notified them both of her suicide. She addressed the letters with the greatest accuracy and laid them in a conspicuous place.
Afterwards Janina calmly took from her pocket the bottle with the poison, uncorked it, held the liquid up to the light and then, without thinking or hesitating any longer drank it to the very dregs.
Suddenly, she stretched out her arms, a gleam of terror shot across her face, her eyes closed, as though blinded by some measureless void that opened before, and she fell prone upon the floor, in dreadful convulsions of pain.
A few days later, Kotlicki, having returned from Lublin where he had installed Topolski's company, was sitting in a coffee-house, looking over the newspapers, and by some strange chance his eye fell upon the following item among the local accidents of the day:
"THE SUICIDE OF AN ACTRESS"
"On Tuesday, in the chambres garnies on Nowy Swiat, the servants were aroused by moans issuing from one of the rooms which an hour ago had been engaged by an unknown woman. They broke open the door and a dreadful sight met their eyes. Upon the floor lay writhing in pain a young and beautiful woman. Two letters left behind by her revealed that she was a certain Janina Orlowska, a former chorus girl who appeared last season in the N. N. Theater under Cabinski's management.
"A physician was called and the unconscious woman was taken to the Hospital of the Infant Jesus. Her condition is serious but it still holds forth some hope. Miss Orlowska poisoned herself with essence of vinegar, as is attested by the bottle that was found in her room. The cause of her desperate act is unknown, but an investigation is being made. . . ."