"The public is a harlot! a harlot!" whispered Topolski threateningly. "To-day she is with a monarch, to-morrow with a clown!" "You have told the truth, but it will not give you even a ruble," answered Wawrzecki, whose humor still survived, but had already become sharp and bitter, for Mimi had left the company and gone to join another one at Posen. Several members of the company had already left, although there still remained a whole week till the end of the season. Especially the choruses had almost entirely dispersed, for they suffered the most from poverty. The rains continued to fall in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening. The atmosphere at the theater became unbearable. There were draughts in the dressing-rooms, and mud covered the floors, for the roof leaked everywhere. The cold was intense. To Janina it seemed that this theater was slowly falling apart and burying everyone among its ruins, while that other one on Theatrical Place stood strong and invincible. Its ponderous walls had grown black from the rains and it appeared even sterner and mightier than before and filled Janina with a pious, unexplainable awe whenever she gazed at it. It sometimes seemed to her that this vast edifice rested its columns on piles of corpses and that it drank the blood, the lives, and the brains of the actors in the smaller theaters and throve and grew mighty on them. "I shall go mad! I shall go mad!" often whispered Janina, pressing her burning head with her hands, for dreams and hallucinations tormented her even more than hunger. There was still another thing which made her deathly silent, so that she would sit for whole hours listening within herself, and thinking of those strange, indefinable impressions and feelings which pervaded her ever more frequently. Janina felt that something dreadful was happening within her, that those sudden fits of trembling and weeping which would seize her without any explainable cause, those violently changing moods to which she gave way and those strange sufferings were somehow unnatural and resulted from something about which she feared to think. She had no mother, nor anyone in whom she could confide and who would enlighten her, but there came a moment when with womanly instinct she knew that she was about to become a mother. Janina wept for a long time after that discovery, but her tears were not tears of despair, but only of tender pity, sensitiveness and shame at the same time. She felt then that death had crouched behind her and was standing so close that it sent a shudder of frenzy through her entire being and cast her into an apathetic indifference. She ceased to think and surrendered herself passively, with the fatalism of people who have suffered long or who have been crushed by some overwhelming misfortune, to the wave that bore her on and did not even ask whither it was taking her.