Among friends, there was a conversation that "for personal improvement, you must first change the conditions among which people live." Everyone respected Ivan Vasilyevich told a story that radically changed his life.
Then he was young and deeply in love with eighteen-year-old Varenka, a beautiful, tall and graceful girl. This was at a time when the narrator studied at a provincial university, and his main pleasure was balls and evenings.
On the last day of Shrovetide, the provincial leader gave the ball. Ivan Vasilyevich “was drunk with love” and danced only with Varenka. Her father, Colonel Pyotr Vladislavich, was also there - "a handsome, handsome and fresh old man." After lunch, the hostess persuaded him to go one round of mazurka paired with his daughter. The whole hall was delighted with this couple, and Ivan Vasilyevich was imbued with an enthusiastic tender feeling to his father Varenka.
That night, Ivan Vasilievich could not sleep, and he went to wander around the city. The legs themselves brought him to Varenka’s house. At the end of the field where her house stood, he saw some kind of crowd, but, coming closer, he saw that it was driven through the ranks of the Tatar deserter. Pyotr Vladislavich walked nearby and watched vigilantly so that the soldiers would lower the stick properly on the red back of the punished, and when he saw Ivan Vasilievich, he pretended that they were not familiar.
The narrator could not understand what was good or bad, what he saw: "If this was done with such confidence and recognized as necessary, then they knew something that I did not know." But without knowing this, he could not enter either the military or any other service.
Since then, every time he saw the pretty face of Varenka, he remembered that morning, and "love never came to naught."