- "Meanwhile, the setting has changed," Nabokov tells us. (5.5.1)
- It is summer, the winter having passed, and Mademoiselle is reading to Vladimir and his brother on the veranda. (They're still in Vyra, here.)
- She reads to them in French, in the heat, as Vladimir works on drawings (often of Mademoiselle's hefty, serious face, though he can never get it right.)
- While she reads, Vladimir goes into a sort of trance, eyes fixed on the landscape, butterflies, and the light coming through a colored-glass window.
- Though later, Mademoiselle speaks often of how close she was to Vladimir, Nabokov will remember something different, his distance from her big, strange body.
- Mademoiselle's room is stuffier and more packed with things than the rest of the house, including a picture of herself as a beautiful, elegant young woman.
- When she comes to comfort the boys after nightmares, she is a bit of a nightmare herself.
- Here, Nabokov confesses that he has never been good at sleeping, and feels jealous that others do so without thinking. He takes sleeping pills as an adult.
- When Vladimir is little, the family doctors, treating his night terrors, prescribe keeping Mademoiselle's door open just a bit. The beam of light is soothing to little Vladimir. On Saturdays, Mademoiselle's night off, she stays up later to take a weekly bath, which means Vladimir should get the relief of the light for a bit longer.
- They are in the town house in St. Petersburg now, and Mademoiselle's bathroom is too far off to relieve much. When he hears her steps from the bathroom to her bedroom, he understands he will loose his light, and feels anxiety.
- In the morning however, Vladimir feels the beauty of the morning light, and the relief, being with Mademoiselle and Sergey, traveling into town.