In this chapter, we are introduced to a young man who has been living with his parents in an orphanage. He is a persistent lover of the girl's mother, who is the orphanage's headmistress. He tells the girl that he will not let her leave the orphanage and that she will not have dinner tonight because she has made a "mistake" by drinking in his bed. The young man tells her that he would have let her out of the orphanage if she had been alive, but she refuses to listen to him. She tells him that she has tried to compromise in her life at the orphanage, but that she always feels "contradictory" and cannot "fit into the life" there.