The following version of this story was used to create this guide: Proust, Marcel. "Young Girls." The New Yorker, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/young-girls.

Note that parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the page number from which the quotation is taken.

"Young Girls" appears as a passage within a seventy-five-page manuscript that Proust wrote in 1908. Although never published as a short story, the passage is unified and brief enough to be considered part of the genre. In the story, a male narrator reflects on his adolescence, remembering his time spent living by the beach in a place called simply "C." He specifically recalls seeing two girls by the shore one day, dressed in unfamiliar but noticeably elite garb. One of the girls had red hair, and she was the one who intrigued him most. Another day he saw five or six of the girls together, and continued to see them intermittently over the course of the season.

Determining that the girls were members of the aristocracy, the narrator desperately wants them to know who he is or to at least have knowledge of his existence. A family friend, whom he calls Monsieur T., was friends with some of the girls' fathers. The narrator begins spending more time with Monsieur T. in hopes that they will run into the girls. One day they do, but the girls are rude in their interaction. At the end of the story, they run into another one of the fathers with his two daughters. The redheaded daughter is polite to the narrator, and the next day she waves at him as he crosses the street.