This is obviously the place for the story, based, of course, on the very modest and slender account given me by the hero of it, of young Bohun's knightly adventure. In its inception the whole affair is still mysterious to me. Looking back from this distance of time I see that he was engaged on one knightly adventure after another--first Vera, then Markovitch, lastly Nina. The first I caught at the very beginning, the second I may be said to have inspired, but to the third I was completely blind. I was blind, I suppose, because, in the first place, Nina had, from the beginning, laughed at Bohun, and in the second, she had been entirely occupied with Lawrence. Bohun's knight-errantry came upon her with, I am sure, as great a shock of surprise as it did upon me. And yet, when you come to think of it, it was the most natural thing. They were the only two of our party who had any claim to real youth, and they were still so young that they could believe in one ideal after another as quick as you can catch goldfish in a bowl of water. Bohun would, of course, have indignantly denied that he was out to help anybody, but that, nevertheless, was the direction in which his character led him; and once Russia had stripped from him that thin coat of self-satisfaction, he had nothing to do but mount his white charger and enter the tournament. I've no idea when he first thought of Nina. He did not, of course, like her at the beginning, and I doubt whether she caused him any real concern, too, until her flight to Grogoff. That shocked him terribly. He confessed as much to me. She had always been so happy and easy about life. Nothing was serious to her. I remember once telling her she ought to take the war more deeply. I was a bit of a prig about it, I suppose. At any rate she thought me one.... And then to go off to a fellow like Grogoff!