Written by 'Johannes the Seducer', this volume illustrates how the aesthete holds the "interesting" as his highest value and how, to satisfy his voyeuristic reflections, he manipulates the girl he calls Cordelia from being boring into being interesting - he grooms her to fall in love with him, but then schemes to have her questioning the idea of engagement. Finally, Johannes succeeds in having Cordelia break the engagement herself. He will use irony, artifice, caprice, imagination and arbitrariness to engineer poetically satisfying possibilities; he is not so much interested in the act of seduction as in willfully creating its interesting possibility.