Liza was thoroughly amazed.  At that moment Panshine appeared in the doorway.  She put the newspaper in her pocket.

“Have you read Obermann,[A] Lizaveta Mikhailovna?” asked Panshine with a thoughtful air.

[Footnote A:  The sentimental romance of that name, written by E. Pivert de Senancour.]

Liza replied vaguely as she passed out of the room, and then went up-stairs.  Lavretsky returned into the drawing room and approached the card table.  Marfa Timofeevna flushed, and with her cap-strings untied, began to complain to him of her partner Gedeonovsky, who, according to her, had not yet learnt his steps.  “Card-playing,” she said, “is evidently a very different thing from gossiping.”  Meanwhile Gedeonovsky never left off blinking and mopping himself with his handkerchief.

Presently Liza returned to the drawing-room and sat down in a corner.  Lavretsky looked at her and she at him, and each experienced a painful sensation.  He could read perplexity on her face, and a kind of secret reproach.  Much as he wished it, he could not get a talk with her, and to remain in the same room with her as a mere visitor among other visitors was irksome to him, so he determined to go away.

When taking leave of her, he contrived to repeat that he would come next day, and he added that he counted on her friendship.  “Come,” she replied, with the same perplexed look still on her face.

After Lavretsky’s departure, Panshine grew animated.  He began to give advice to Gedeonovsky, and to make mock love to Madame Belenitsine, and at last he sang his romance.  But when gazing at Liza, or talking to her, he maintained the same air as before, one of deep meaning, with a touch of sadness in it.

All that night also, Lavretsky did not sleep.  He was not unhappy, he was not agitated; on the contrary, he was perfectly calm; but he could not sleep.  He was not even recalling the past.  He simply looked at his present life.  His heart beat firmly and equably, the hours flew by, he did not even think about sleeping.  Only at times there came into his head the thought, “Surely this is not true, this is all nonsense.”  And then he would stop short, and presently let his head fall back and again betake himself to gazing into the stream of his life.

XXVII.

Madame Kalitine did not receive Lavretsky over cordially, when he paid her a visit next day.  “Ah! he’s making a custom of it,” she thought.  She was not of herself disposed to like him very much, and Panshine, who had got her thoroughly under his influence, had praised him the evening before in a very astutely disparaging manner.  As she did not treat him as an honored guest, nor think it necessary to trouble herself about one who was a relation, almost a member of the family circle, before half an hour had elapsed he went out into the garden.  There he and Liza strolled along one of the alleys, while Lenochka and Shurochka played around the flower-pots at a little distance from them.