“No!” he cried, “I can’t play to-day; it’s a good thing Lemm did not hear us; he would have had a fit.” Lisa got up, shut the piano, and turned round to Panshin. “What are we going to do?” she asked. “That’s just like you, that question! You can never sit with your hands idle. Well, if you like let us sketch, since it’s not quite dark. Perhaps the other muse, the muse of painting--what was her name? I have forgotten... will be more propitious to me. Where’s your album? I remember, my landscape there is not finished.” Lisa went into the other room to fetch the album, and Panshin, left alone, drew a cambric handkerchief out of his pocket, and rubbed his nails and looked as it were critically at his hands. He had beautiful white hands; on the second finger of his left hand he wore a spiral gold ring. Lisa came back; Panshin sat down at the window, and opened the album. “Ah!” he exclaimed: “I see that you have begun to copy my landscape--and capitally too. Excellent! only just here--give me a pencil--the shadows are not put in strongly enough. Look.” And Panshin with a flourish added a few long strokes. He was for ever drawing the same landscape: in the foreground large disheveled trees, a stretch of meadow in the background, and jagged mountains on the horizon. Lisa looked over his shoulders at his work. “In drawing, just as in life generally,” observed Panshin, holding his head to right and to left, “lightness and boldness--are the great things.” At that instant Lemm came into the room, and with a stiff bow was about to leave it; but Panshin, throwing aside album and pencils, placed himself in his way. “Where are you going, dear Christopher Fedoritch? Aren’t you going to stay and have tea with us?” “I go home,” answered Lemm in a surly voice; “my head aches.” “Oh, what nonsense!--do stop. We’ll have an argument about Shakespeare.” “My head aches,” repeated the old man. “We set to work on the sonata of Beethoven without you,” continued Panshin, taking hold of him affectionately and smiling brightly, “but we couldn’t get on at all. Fancy, I couldn’t play two notes together correctly.” “You’d better have sung your song again,” replied Lemm, removing Panshin’s hands, and he walked away. Lisa ran after him. She overtook him on the stairs. “Christopher Fedoritch, I want to tell you,” she said to him in German, accompanying him over the short green grass of the yard to the gate, “I did wrong--forgive me.” Lemm made no answer. “I showed Vladimir Nikolaitch your cantata; I felt sure he would appreciate it,--and he did like it very much really.” Lemm stopped. “It’s no matter,” he said in Russian, and then added in his own language, “but he cannot understand anything; how is it you don’t see that? He’s a dilettante--and that’s all!” “You are unjust to him,” replied Lisa, “he understands everything, and he can do almost everything himself.”