Ariane, A Russian Girl, the tale of a young girl in pre-revolutionary Russia who is unafraid to exercise her sexual independence, is the basis for the Audrey Hepburn film Love in the Afternoon. Beautiful, spirited, brilliant Ariane is seventeen and lives with her aunt in the provinces. Once settled in Moscow, Ariane meets Constantine Michel, a man of the world who casually proposes an affair, while warning her not to grow too attached to him. Soon enough the two are involved, even as it is Ariane, increasingly, who holds Constantine at bay emotionally, deploying irony and cynicism and often leaving him at a loss. Constantine, fascinated and infuriated, grows resentfully aware he does not know much of anything about Ariane, whom, among other things, he had taken to be a good deal older than, on her eighteenth birthday, he discovers her to be.