There is a good reason for the fact that I was never one with my companions, that I remained lonely even in their midst, that I suffered in the manner above described. I was a hero of drinking bouts, with the roughest of them, I was a scoffer after their own heart. I showed courage and wit in my ideas and in my talks about masters, school, parents, the church⁠—I listened to their smutty stories unflinchingly and even ventured one or two myself⁠—but I was never about when my boon companions went off with girls. I remained behind alone, filled with an ardent desire for love, a hopeless longing, whereas to judge from my conversation I must have been a hardened rake. No one was more vulnerable, no one more chaste than I. And when from time to time I saw young girls pass by in the town, pretty and clean, bright and charming, they seemed to me like wonderful, pure dream women, a thousand times too good and too pure for me. For a long time I could not bring myself to enter Mrs. Jaggelt’s stationery shop, because I blushed when I saw her and thought of what Alphonse Beck had told me about her.