“Whatever you like,” answered Lavretsky,
taking a seat where he could look at her.
Liza began to play, and went on for some time with-out
lifting her eyes from her fingers. At last she
looked at Lavretsky, and stopped playing. The
expression of his face seemed so strange and unusual
to her.
“What is the, matter?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he replied. “All
is well with me at present. I feel happy on your
account; it makes me glad to look at you—do
go on.”
“I think,” said Liza, a few minutes later,
“if he had really loved me he would not have
written that letter; he ought to have felt that I
could not answer him just now.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Lavretsky;
“what does matter is that you do not love him.”
“Stop! What is that you are saying?
The image of your dead wife is always haunting me,
and I feel afraid of you.”
“Doesn’t my Liza play well, Woldemar?”
Madame Kalitine was saying at this moment to Panshine.
“Yes,” replied Panshine, “exceedingly
well.”
Madame Kalitine looked tenderly at her young partner;
but he assumed a still more important and pre-occupied
look, and called fourteen kings.
Lavretsky was no longer a very young man. He
could not long delude himself as to the nature of
the feeling with which Liza had inspired him.
On that day he became finally convinced that he was
in love with her. That conviction did not give
him much pleasure.
“Is it possible,” he thought, “that
at five-and-thirty I have nothing else to do than
to confide my heart a second time to a woman’s
keeping? But Liza is not like her.
She would not have demanded humiliating sacrifices
from me. She would not have led me astray from
my occupations. She would have inspired me herself
with a love for honorable hard work, and we should
have gone forward together towards some noble end.
Yes,” he said, bringing his reflections to a
close, “all that is very well. But the
worst of it is that she will not go anywhere with
me. It was not for nothing that she told me she
was afraid of me. And as to her not being in
love with Panshine—that is but a poor consolation!”
Lavretsky went to Vasilievskoe; but he could not manage
to spend even four days there—so wearisome
did it seem to him. Moreover, he was tormented
by suspense. The news which M. Jules had communicated
required confirmation, and he had not yet received
any letters. He returned to town, and passed
the evening at the Kalitines’. He could
easily see that Madame Kalitine had been set against
him; but he succeeded in mollifying her a little by
losing some fifteen roubles to her at piquet.
He also contrived to get half-an-hour alone with Liza,
in spite of her mother having recommended her, only
the evening before, not to be too intimate with a
man “qui a tin si grand ridicule.”
