"Yes, I wanted to take a look at nature and to forget." "Forget about what?" "About life!" Janina whispered hoarsely and tears of violent grief filled her eyes. "You are a child. It must have been some disappointment in love, some thwarted ambition, or perhaps the lack of a dinner that put you in such a tragic mood." "All that taken together is not enough to make one feel very, very unhappy," answered Janina. "All that taken together is one big zero, for according to my way of thinking there is nothing that can make wholly unhappy an individual who knows himself," he said. "Who are you . . . that is, what do you do?" he asked, after pausing a while. "I am in the theater," answered the girl. "Aha! the world of comedy! Simulation which you afterwards take for reality. Chimeras! All that warps the human soul. The greatest actors are merely phonographs wound up sometimes by sages, sometimes by geniuses, but most often by fools. And they speak to even greater fools. Actors, artists, creators are merely blind instruments of nature which uses them to reveal itself and for ends known to itself alone! To them it seems that they are something real, but that is a sad deception, for they are merely instruments which are thrown into the discard when they are no longer needed or have lost their usefulness." "Who are you?" Janina asked, almost unknowingly, stirred by his words. "An old man as you see, who fishes and likes to chat. Oh yes, I am very old. I come here for a few hours every day in the summertime, if the weather is fair, and catch fish, if they let themselves be caught. What good will it do you to know who I am? My name will tell you nothing. In the sum total of humanity I am merely a pawn which is given a certain number upon entrance into this world and retains the same at the time of its exit. I am a cell of feeling long ago registered and classified by my fellow-beings as a 'ne'er-do-well,'" he said, smiling. "I had no intention of offending you by my question." "I never get angry about anything. Only foolish people anger themselves or rejoice. A man ought merely to look on, observe, and go his own way," he added, drawing a gudgeon from his hook. Janina was a bit chilled by his gravity and by his decisive way of speaking which admitted of no discussion. "Are you from the Warsaw Theater?" he asked, throwing out his line again. "No, I am in Cabinski's company. No doubt you know him." "I don't know him, nor have I heard about him." "Is it possible that you have never heard anything about Cabinski, nor read about the Tivoli?" asked Janina greatly surprised that there could be anyone in Warsaw who did not know and was not interested in the theater. "I do not go to the theater at all and I do not read the papers," he answered. "Impossible!" "One can see right away that you must not be more than twenty years old, for you cry out in amazement, 'Impossible!' and look at me as though I were a lunatic or a barbarian."