m he exchanged a cold greeting. Then he went home and shut himself
up in his room. The sensations he experienced were such as he had
hardly ever known before. Was it long ago that he was in a condition
of "peaceful torpor?" Was it long ago that he felt himself, as he had
expressed it, "at the very bottom of the river?" What then had changed
his condition? What had brought him to the surface, to the light of
day? Was the most ordinary and inevitable, though always unexpected,
of occurrences--death? Yes. But yet it was not so much his wife's
death, his own freedom, that he was thinking about, as this--what
answer will Liza give to Panshine?

He felt that in the course of the last three days he had begun to look
on Liza with different eyes. He remembered how, when he was returning
home and thinking of her in the silence of the night, he said to
himself "If!--" This "if," by which at that time he had referred to
the past, to the impossible, now applied to an actual state of things,
but not exactly such a one as he had then supposed. Freedom by itself
was little to him now. "She will obey her mother," he thought. "She
will marry Panshine. But even if she refuses him--will it not be just
the same as far as I am concerned?" Passing at that moment in front of
a looking-glass, he just glanced at his face in it, and then shrugged
his shoulders.

Amid such thoughts as these the day passed swiftly by. The evening
arrived, and Lavretsky went to the Kalitines. He walked fast until he
drew near to the house, but then he slackened his pace. Panshine's
carriage was standing before the door. "Well," thought Lavretsky,
as he entered the house, "I will not be selfish." No one met him
in-doors, and all seemed quiet in the drawing-room. He opened the
door, and found that Madame Kalitine was playing piquet with Panshine.
That gentleman bowed to him silently, while the lady of the house
exclaimed, "Well, this is an unexpected pleasure," and slightly
frowned. Lavretsky sat down beside her and began looking at her cards.

"So you can play piquet?" she asked, with a shade of secret vexation
in her voice, and then remarked that she had thrown away a wrong card.

Panshine counted ninety, and began to take up the tricks calmly and
politely, his countenance the while wearing a grave and dignified
expression. It was thus, he thought, that diplomatists ought to play.
It was thus, in all probability, that he used to play with some
influential dignit