Before leaving, Gordon urged Nina to marry him, but her father objected. Now Gordon is dead, and Nina has not even the memory of one night alone with him. Instead, she has indiscriminate affairs with one soldier after another, those who like Gordon are going out to die, because she thinks she can give to others what Gordon was denied. When promiscuity fails to ease her sorrow, she returns to her father’s house an embittered and lonely woman. She is particularly bitter toward her father, a professor in the university, for she suspects that her father’s jealousy and irrational desire to keep her with him led to his opposing her marriage with Gordon.