Shura Sevastyanov is an aspiring journalist in a small newspaper, with two-classes of a parochial school behind him.
He denies the phenomenon of love, believing that it does not exist and that there is only friendship and sexual desire of man to woman.
The idyll is destroyed when Zoe finds a job in a cafe, which is located across the street from their home.
When he visits the café, Shura meets a storekeeper who tries to warn Sevastyanov about the dangers which lie in the cafe for Zoe.
Shura goes to his funeral in Margaritovka, and when he returns, learns that Zoe left him and ran away with the cafe's storekeeper, in addition to taking a vast sum of money from the cash register.