Agafia never blamed any one, and she never scolded Liza for any childish faults.  When she was dissatisfied about anything, she merely kept silence, and Liza always understood that silence.  With a child’s quick instinct, she also knew well when Agafia was dissatisfied with others, whether it were with Maria Dmitrievna or with Kalitine himself.

For rather more than three years Agafia waited upon Liza.  She was replaced by Mademoiselle Moreau; but the frivolous Frenchwoman, with her dry manner and her constant exclamation, Tout ca c’est des betises! could not expel from Liza’s heart the recollection of her much-loved nurse.  The seeds that had been sown had pushed their roots too far for that.  After that Agafia, although she had ceased to attend Liza, remained for some time longer in the house, and often saw her pupil, and treated her as she had been used to do.

But when Marfa Timofeevna entered the Kalitines’ house, Agafia did not get on well with her.  The austere earnestness of the former “wearer of the coarse petticoat.” [Footnote:  The Panovnitsa, or wearer of the Panovna, a sort of petticoat made of a coarse stuff of motley hue.] did not please the impatient and self-willed old lady.  Agafia obtained leave to go on a pilgrimage, and she never came back.  Vague rumors asserted that she had retired into a schismatic convent.  But the impression left by her on Liza’s heart did not disappear.  Just as before, the girl went to mass, as if she were going to a festival; and when in church prayed with enthusiasm, with a kind of restrained and timid rapture, at which her mother secretly wondered not a little.  Even Marfa Timofeevna, although she never put any constraint upon Liza, tried to induce her to moderate her zeal, and would not let her make so many prostrations.  It was not a lady-like habit, she said.

Liza was a good scholar, that is, a persevering one; she was not gifted with a profound intellect, or with extraordinarily brilliant faculties, and nothing yielded to her without demanding from her no little exertion.  She was a good pianiste, but no one else, except Lemm, knew how much that accomplishment had cost her.  She did not read much, and she had no “words of her own;” but she had ideas of her own, and she went her own way.  In this matter, as well as in personal appearance, she may have taken after her father, for he never used to ask any one’s advice as to what he should do.

And so she grew up, and So did her life pass, gently and tranquilly, until she had attained her nineteenth year.  She was very charming, but she was not conscious of the fact.  In all her movements, a natural, somewhat unconventional, grace, revealed itself; in her voice there sounded the silver notes of early youth.  The slightest pleasurable sensation would bring a fascinating smile to her lips, and add a deeper light, a kind of secret tenderness, to her already lustrous eyes.  Kind and soft-hearted, thoroughly penetrated by a feeling of duty, and a fear of injuring any one in any way, she was attached to all whom she knew, but to no one person in particular.  To God alone did she consecrate her love—­loving Him with a timid, tender enthusiasm.  Until Lavretsky came, no one had troubled the calmness of her inner life.