Maria Dmitrievna admiringly agreed with him.  “What a clever man to have talking in my house!” she thought.  Liza kept silence, leaning back in the recess of the window.  Lavretsky kept silence too.  Marfa Timofeevna, who was playing cards in a corner with her friend, grumbled something to herself.  Panshine walked up and down the room, speaking well, but with a sort of suppressed malice.  It seemed as if he was blaming, not so much a whole generation, as some individuals of his acquaintance.  A nightingale had made its home in a large lilac bush which stood in the Kalitines’ garden, and the first notes of its even-song made themselves heard during the pauses in the eloquent harangue; the first stars began to kindle in the rose-stained sky above the motionless tops of the lime trees.  Presently Lavretsky rose and began to reply to Panshine.  A warm dispute soon commenced.

Lavretsky spoke in defence of the youth of Russia, and of the capacity of the country to suffice for itself.  He surrendered himself and his contemporaries, but he stood up for the new generation, and their wishes and convictions.  Panshine replied incisively and irritably, declared that clever people were bound to reform every thing, and at length was carried away to such an extent that, forgetting his position as a chamberlain, and his proper line of action as a member of the civil service, he called Lavretsky a retrogade conservative, and alluded—­very distantly it is true—­to his false position in society.  Lavretsky did not lose his temper, nor did he raise his voice; he remembered that Mikhalevich also had called him a retrograde, and, at the same time a disciple of Voltaire; but he calmly beat Panshine on every point.  He proved the impracticability of reforming by sudden bounds, and of introducing changes haughtily schemed on the heights of official self-complacency—­changes which were not justified by any intimate acquaintance with the country, nor by a living faith in any ideal, not even in one of negation, and in illustration of this he adduced his own education.  He demanded before every thing else that the true spirit of the nation should be recognized, and that it should be looked up to with that humility without which no courage is possible, not even that wherewith to oppose falsehood.  Finally he did not attempt to make any defence against what he considered a deserved reproach, that of giving way to a wasteful and inconsiderate expenditure of both time and strength.

“All that is very fine!” at last exclaimed Panshine with vexation.  “But here are you, just returned to Russia; what do you intend to do?”

“To cultivate the soil,” replied Lavretsky; “and to cultivate it as well as possible.”

“No doubt that is very praiseworthy,” answered Panshine, “and I hear you have already had great success in that line; but you must admit that every one is not fitted for such an occupation—­”

“Une nature poetique,” said Maria Dmitrievna, “certainly cannot go cultivating the soil—­et puis, it is your vocation, Vladimir Nikolaevich, to do every thing en grand.”