On the terrace with her are several young ladies of various colours and a retired officer who is staying in the villa next to ours.  He was wounded during the last war in the left temple and the right hip.  This unfortunate man is, like myself, proposing to devote the summer to literary work.  He is writing the “Memoirs of a Military Man.”  Like me, he begins his honourable labours every morning, but before he has written more than “I was born in . . .” some Varenka or Mashenka is sure to appear under his balcony, and the wounded hero is borne off under guard.

All the party sitting on the terrace are engaged in preparing some miserable fruit for jam.  I make my bows and am about to beat a retreat, but the young ladies of various colours seize my hat with a squeal and insist on my staying.  I sit down.  They give me a plate of fruit and a hairpin.  I begin taking the seeds out.

The young ladies of various colours talk about men:  they say that So-and-So is nice-looking, that So-and-So is handsome but not nice, that somebody else is nice but ugly, and that a fourth would not have been bad-looking if his nose were not like a thimble, and so on.

“And you, Monsieur Nicolas,” says Varenka’s mamma, turning to me, “are not handsome, but you are attractive. . . .  There is something about your face. . . .  In men, though, it’s not beauty but intelligence that matters,” she adds, sighing.

The young ladies sigh, too, and drop their eyes . . . they agree that the great thing in men is not beauty but intelligence.  I steal a glance sideways at a looking-glass to ascertain whether I really am attractive.  I see a shaggy head, a bushy beard, moustaches, eyebrows, hair on my cheeks, hair up to my eyes, a perfect thicket with a solid nose sticking up out of it like a watch-tower.  Attractive! h’m!

“But it’s by the qualities of your soul, after all, that you will make your way, Nicolas,” sighs Nadenka’s mamma, as though affirming some secret and original idea of her own.

And Nadenka is sympathetically distressed on my account, but the conviction that a man passionately in love with her is sitting opposite is obviously a source of the greatest enjoyment to her.

When they have done with men, the young ladies begin talking about love.  After a long conversation about love, one of the young ladies gets up and goes away.  Those that remain begin to pick her to pieces.  Everyone agrees that she is stupid, unbearable, ugly, and that one of her shoulder-blades sticks out in a shocking way.

But at last, thank goodness!  I see our maid.  My maman has sent her to call me in to dinner.  Now I can make my escape from this uncongenial company and go back to my work.  I get up and make my bows.

Varenka’s maman, Varenka herself, and the variegated young ladies surround me, and declare that I cannot possibly go, because I promised yesterday to dine with them and go to the woods to look for mushrooms.  I bow and sit down again.  My soul is boiling with rage, and I feel that in another moment I may not be able to answer for myself, that there may be an explosion, but gentlemanly feeling and the fear of committing a breach of good manners compels me to obey the ladies.  And I obey them.