"I don't pretend to be a judge, but I liked the play immensely. It is so frank." "What? Do you mean that seriously?" he cried. "Of course." "For you see, I told myself that if this play fails, I shall . . ." "Will you give up writing?" "No, but I shall vanish from the horizon for a few months and write another one. I will write a second, a third . . . I will write until I produce a perfectly good one! I must!" "Tell me, do you think Majkowska will make a good Antka in my play?" he suddenly asked. "It seems to me that that role is well-suited to her." "Maurice also will play his part well, but the rest of them are a miserable lot and the staging terrible. It's bound to turn out a fiasco!" "Mimi knows nothing about the peasants and her imitation of their dialect is ludicrous," remarked Janina. "I heard her and it pained me to listen! Do you know the peasants? Ah, Great Scott!" he cried impulsively. "Why don't you act that role? . . ." "Because they didn't give it to me." "Why didn't you tell me about that sooner? May the deuce take me, but even if I had to smash up the whole theater I would have forced them to give you that role!" "The director gave me the part of Phillip's wife." "That's merely a super, an episode . . . it could have been given to anyone. I feel that Mimi is going to chatter like a soubrette from an operetta. See what you have caused me! By glory, what a mess! If you think that life is a charming operetta, you are greatly mistaken!" "I already happen to know something about that . . ." answered Janina with a bitter smile. "So far you don't know anything . . . you will learn it only later on. But after all women usually have an easier time of it. We men have to fight hard to grasp our share and have to pay dearly. God knows how dearly." "Don't you think the women pay anything?" "It's this way: women, and particularly those on the stage, owe the minimum part of their success to their talents or themselves; the maximum part to their lovers who support them and the rest to the gallantry of those men who hope to be able to support them some day." Janina answered nothing, for there flashed before her mind a picture of Majkowska with Topolski in back of her, Mimi with Wawrzecki, Kaczkowska with one of the journalists and so on through almost all of them. "Don't be angry with me. I merely stated a fact that came to my mind." "No. I'm not angry. I admit you're entirely right." "With you, it will not be that way, I feel it. Come, let us go now!" he suddenly cried, jumping up from the bench.