He only learns to ignore them in the second year when he imagines himself in love with Ina Damman, whose real name is Antonia, and thus is a projection of the protagonist: "she embodies the ideal image he has of himself, the suspicion of his possibilities".
Wachter shifts his erotic desire to a domestic servant called Janke (a type of Else Böhler, who figures in a later Vestdijk novel[1]).
[7] Maarten 't Hart's bestselling novel Een vlucht regenwulpen is considered a "modernized version" of Terug tot Ina Damman.
[4][8] In a lengthy review of Vestdijk's Else Böhler, Duitsch Dienstmeisje (1935), Menno ter Braak argued that the later novel is a sort of polar opposite of the earlier: "Anton Wachter, the schoolboy in his boy's world, in which the reality of the imagination can still conquer touch with life itself, has grown up in the new novel and is called Mr. Johan Roodenhuis; Ina Damman, the far-removed, platonic one has come frighteningly close and is called Else Böhler, German servant girl".
[9] In the 1950s and 1960s, Terug tot Ina Damman was one of the Vestdijk novels found on the reading list of every high school student in the Netherlands.