Refusing the assistance of a servant, Lemm packed his little portmanteau, growing peevish the while and groaning over it, and then tore up and burnt some sheets of music paper.  The carriage came to the door.  As Lavretsky left his study he put in his pocket the copy of the newspaper he had read the night before.  During the whole of the journey neither Lavretsky nor Lemm said much.  Each of them was absorbed in his own thoughts, and each was glad that the other did not disturb him.  And they parted rather coldly, an occurrence which, for the matter of that, often occurs among friends in Russia.  Lavretsky drove the old man to his modest dwelling.  Lemm took his portmanteau with him as he got out of the carriage, and, without stretching out his hand to his friend, he held the portmanteau before him with both hands, and, without even looking at him, said in Russian, “Farewell!” “Farewell!” echoed Lavretsky, and told the coachman to drive to his apartments; for he had taken lodgings in O.

After writing several letters, and making a hasty dinner, he went to the Kalitines’.  There he found no one in the drawing-room but Panshine, who told him that Maria Dmitrievna would come directly, and immediately entered into conversation with him in the kindest and most affable manner.  Until that day Panshine had treated Lavretsky, not with haughtiness exactly, but with condescension; but Liza, in describing her excursion of the day before, had spoken of Lavretsky as an excellent and clever man.  That was enough; the “excellent” man must be captivated.

Panshine began by complimenting Lavretsky, giving him an account of the rapture with which, according to him, all the Kalitine family had spoken of Vasilievskoe; then, according to his custom, adroitly bringing the conversation round to himself, he began to speak of his occupations, of his views concerning life, the world, and the service; said a word or two about the future of Russia, and about the necessity of holding the Governors of provinces in hand; joked facetiously about himself in that respect, and added that he, among others, had been entrusted at St. Petersburg with the commission de populariser l’idee du cadastre.  He spoke at tolerable length, and with careless assurance, solving all difficulties, and playing with the most important administrative and political questions as a juggler does with his balls.  Such expressions as, “That is what I should do if I were the Government,” and, “You, as an intelligent man, doubtless agree with me,” were always at the tip of his tongue.

Lavretsky listened coldly to Panshine’s eloquence.  This handsome, clever, and unnecessarily elegant young man, with his serene smile, his polite voice, and his inquisitive eyes, was not to his liking.  Panshine soon guessed, with the quick appreciation of the feelings of others which was peculiar to him, that he did not confer any special gratification on the person he was addressing, so he disappeared under cover of some plausible excuse, having made up his mind that Lavretsky might be an excellent man, but that he was unsympathetic, “aigri” and, en somme, somewhat ridiculous.