General Tulenkov said, ‘Are you comfortable? We can arrange to have an easy chair brought up.’

‘No, thank you. This is fine.’

‘Hors de combat,’ the General said, ‘and watching the ladies in their finery. I recall it as one of the most agreeable experiences of my life. Do you find it so?’

‘It’s not unpleasant.’

‘Surely, something more than that. I was younger than you at the time – not much more than twenty. And even if not precisely wounded in the military sense, I was a military casualty – a gun carriage rolled back on me during manoeuvres and broke my arm. I went to the royal ball at St. Petersburg with my arm fastened in a scarlet sash. And I have never known women look lovelier than on that night, when I could neither dance with them nor embrace them. They flirted with me, and swept away to dance in the arms of unimpeded men, and came back to flirt again. It sets a woman at her highest pitch to know she can flirt with impunity, and for me – well, there was all the pleasure of desire with neither the urgency nor the prospect of satiation that commonly go with it. The air was soft and bright and full of promises. What promises they were! Some I succeeded in redeeming when my arm had knit again, but many of them could only live on impossibility. Afterward they shrivelled and died, as both sides had known they would; and they were the best, of course.’