"Marry, marry! As if that were easy for a girl without property. Who is there among us? Gantovski. He would take her. He is a good man, and not at all so limited as they say. But she has no feeling for him, and she will not marry without feeling. Yalbrykov is a small estate. Besides, it seems to the old man that the Gantovskis are something inferior to the Plavitskis, and Gantovski too believes this. With us, as you know, that man passes for a person of great family who is pleased to boast himself such. Though people laugh at Plavitski, they have grown used to his claim. Moreover, one man raises his nose because he is making property, another because he is losing it, and nothing else remains to him. But let that pass. I know one thing, whoever gets Marynia will get a pearl." Pan Stanislav had in his mind at that moment the same conviction and feeling. Sinking, therefore, into meditation, he began again to muse about Marynia, or, rather, to call her to mind and depict her to himself. All at once it even seemed to him that he would be sad without her; but he remembered that similar things had seemed so to him more than once, and that time had swept away the illusion. Still he thought of her, even when they were approaching the city; and when he got out at Warsaw, he muttered through his teeth,-- "How stupidly it happened! how stupidly!" CHAPTER IV. On his return to Warsaw, Pan Stanislav passed the first evening at the house of his partner, Bigiel, with whom, as a former schoolmate, he was connected by personal intimacy.