"While you are learning it, I could act as a prompter for you, if you like." "Oh, I should not want to take up any of your time . . ." "Exclude a few hours each day for the performance and the rest of my time is yours to dispose of as you will," he said with fervor. They gazed at each other a moment. Janina gave Wladek her hand; he held and kissed it for a long time. "Beginning with to-morrow I shall start to learn the part for I have a day off," said Janina. "I also do not appear on the stage to-morrow." Wladek went out a little angry at himself, for although he called Janina a "comedienne" she had made him feel abashed with her simplicity and enthusiasm. Moreover, he felt in her a certain intellectual and artistic superiority. Janina feverishly applied herself to the study of Doctor Robin. In a few days she knew not only the role of "Mary," but had memorized the entire play. So intensely eager was she to play the role, that it seemed as though she were staking her whole life on this performance. Her former dreams that had been subdued a bit by poverty and the feverish life of the theater now again burst forth with a flaming intensity that dazzled and hypnotized her. The theater again took so powerful a hold on Janina that there was no room in her consciousness for anything else. In her hours of ecstasy it appeared to her like a mystic altar suspended high above the gray vale of everyday life and glowing with flames like a second burning bush of Moses; it seemed to her like a miracle that endured eternally. Wladek came to see Janina each day in the interval between the rehearsal and the performance, although he was already beginning to be immensely bored by her endlessly repeated raptures and was growing impatient over the fact that in her mad absorption in art she did not pay much attention to him. He could not penetrate her morbid enthusiasm, as he called it, with his love, but he nevertheless continued to go to her. He began to desire Janina's love ever more strongly. He was invited by her naivete and by the talent which he felt she possessed. Moreover, he had long since desired just such an elegant and educated mistress. He wanted by all means to possess this refined and genteel girl, who was so different from his former mistresses and who captivated him by the charm of her superiority. His triumph would be all the greater, he told himself, because of the fact that she seemed to him one of those ladies of the fashionable world upon whom he would often cast covetous glances in the Ujazdowskie Allees. Janina had not told Wladek that she loved him, but he already saw it in her eyes and spun an ever stronger web about her made up of smiles, passionate words, sighs, and exaggerated respect. For Janina this was the most beautiful period that she had known in her life. Poverty she treated with scorn, as though it were only a temporary thing that would soon pass away.