“It was in St. Petersburg, in winter, on the first day of Maslenitsa. I was invited to dinner by one of my boarding house comrades, who in his youth was known as a pretty girl and later turned out to be not a shy person at all. He has already died, like most of my comrades. Besides me, a certain Konstantin Aleksandrovich Asanov and another literary celebrity of that time promised to come to dinner. The literary celebrity forced herself to wait and finally sent a note that she would not be, and in her place appeared a little blond gentleman, one of those eternal uninvited guests with whom St. Petersburg abounds...”