ied Lavretzky:--"and try to till it as well as
possible."

"That is very praiseworthy, there's no disputing that,"--rejoined
Panshin:--"and I have been told, that you have already had great success
in that direction; but you must admit, that not every one is fitted for
that sort of occupation...."

"_Une nature poetique_,"--began Marya Dmitrievna,--"of course, cannot
till the soil ... _et puis_, you are called, Vladimir Nikolaitch, to do
everything _en grand_."

This was too much even for Panshin: he stopped short, and the
conversation stopped short also. He tried to turn it on the beauty of the
starry sky, on Schubert's music--but, for some reason, it would not run
smoothly; he ended, by suggesting to Marya Dmitrievna, that he should
play picquet with her.--"What! on such an evening?"--she replied feebly;
but she ordered the cards to be brought.

Panshin, with a crackling noise, tore open the fresh pack, while Liza
and Lavretzky, as though in pursuance of an agreement, both rose, and
placed themselves beside Marfa Timofeevna. They both, suddenly, felt so
very much at ease that they were even afraid to be left alone
together,--and, at the same time, both felt that the embarrassment which
they had experienced during the last few days had vanished, never more to
return. The old woman stealthily patted Lavretzky on the cheek, slyly
screwed up her eyes, and shook her head several times, remarking in a
whisper: "Thou hast got the best of the clever fellow, thanks."
Everything in the room became still; the only sound was the faint
crackling of the wax candles, and, now and then, the tapping of hands on
the table, and an exclamation, or the reckoning of the spots,--and the
song, mighty, resonant to the verge of daring, of the nightingale, poured
in a broad stream through the window, in company with the dewy coolness.

XXXIV

Liza had not uttered a single word during the course of the dispute
between Lavretzky and Panshin, but had attentively followed it, and had
been entirely on Lavretzky's side. Politics possessed very little
interest for her; but the self-confident tone of the fashionable official
(he had never, hitherto, so completely expressed himself) had repelled
her; his scorn of Russia had wounded her. It had never entered Liza's
head, that she was a patriot; but she was at her ease with Russian
people; the Russian turn of mind gladdened her; without any affectation,
for