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 dignitary at St. Petersburg, whom he wished to impress with a favorable idea of his solidity and perspicacity.  “One hundred and one, hundred and two, heart, hundred and three,” said the measured tones of his voice, and Lavretsky could not tell which it expressed—­dislike or assurance.

“Can’t I see Marfa Timofeevna?” asked Lavretsky, observing that Panshine, with a still more dignified air than before, was about to shuffle the cards; not even a trace of the artist was visible in him now.

“I suppose so.  She is up-stairs in her room,” answered Maria Dmitrievna.  “You can ask for her.”

Lavretsky went up-stairs.  He found Marfa Timofeevna also at cards.  She was playing at Durachki with Nastasia Carpovna.  Roska barked at him, but both the old ladies received him cordially.  Marfa Timofeevna seemed in special good humor.

“Ah, Fedia!” she said, “do sit down, there’s a good fellow.  We shall have done our game directly.  Will you have some preserves?  Shurochka, give him a pot of strawberries.  You won’t have any?  Well, then, sit there as you are.  But as to smoking, you mustn’t.  I cannot abide your strong tobacco; besides, it would make Matros sneeze.”