that is our affair—­the affair of the official (he almost said “governing”) class.  But in case of need don’t be uneasy.  The institutions will transform the life itself.”  Marya Dmitrievna most feelingly assented to all Panshin said.  “What a clever man,” she thought, “is talking in my drawing-room!” Lisa sat in silence leaning back against the window; Lavretsky too was silent.  Marfa Timofyevna, playing cards with her old friend in the corner, muttered something to herself.  Panshin walked up and down the room, and spoke eloquently, but with secret exasperation.  It seemed as if he were abusing not a whole generation but a few people known to him.  In a great lilac bush in the Kalitins’ garden a nightingale had built its nest; its first evening notes filled the pauses of the eloquent speech; the first stars were beginning to shine in the rosy sky over the motionless tops of the limes.  Lavretsky got up and began to answer Panshin; an argument sprang up.  Lavretsky championed the youth and the independence of Russia; he was ready to throw over himself and his generation, but he stood up for the new men, their convictions and desires.  Panshin answered sharply and irritably.  He maintained that the intelligent people ought to change everything, and was at last even brought to the point of forgetting his position as a kammer-yunker, and his career as an official, and calling Lavretsky an antiquated conservative, even hinting—­very remotely it is true—­at his dubious position in society.  Lavretsky did not lose his temper.  He did not raise his voice (he recollected that Mihalevitch too had called him antiquated but an antiquated Voltairean), and calmly proceeded to refute Panshin at all points.  He proved to him the impracticability of sudden leaps and reforms from above, founded neither on knowledge of the mother-country, nor on any genuine faith in any ideal, even a negative one.  He brought forward his own education as an example, and demanded before all things a recognition of the true spirit of the people and submission to it, without which even a courageous combat against error is impossible.  Finally he admitted the reproach—­well-deserved as he thought—­of reckless waste of time and strength.

“That is all very fine!’ cried Panshin at last, getting angry.  “You now have just returned to Russia, what do you intend to do?”

“Cultivate the soil,” answered Lavretsky, “and try to cultivate it as well as possible.”

“That is very praiseworthy, no doubt,” rejoined Panshin, “and I have been told that you have already had great success in that line; but you must allow that not every one is fit for pursuits of that kind.”

“Une nature poetique,” observed Marya Dmitrievna, “cannot, to be sure, cultivate . . . et puis, it is your vocation, Vladimir Nikolaich, to do everything en grand.”