Liza wished to reply, but she could not utter a single word. Not that she had decided on being "hasty"--but because her heart beat too strongly, and a feeling resembling that of fear impeded her breathing. XXVIII. As Lavretsky was leaving the Kalitines' house he met Panshine, with whom he exchanged a cold greeting. Then he went home and shut himself up in his room. The sensations he experienced were such as he had hardly ever known before. Was it long ago that he was in a condition of "peaceful torpor?" Was it long ago that he felt himself, as he had expressed it, "at the very bottom of the river?" What then had changed his condition? What had brought him to the surface, to the light of day? Was the most ordinary and inevitable, though always unexpected, of occurrences--death? Yes. But yet it was not so much his wife's death, his own freedom, that he was thinking about, as this--what answer will Liza give to Panshine? He felt that in the course of the last three days he had begun to look on Liza with different eyes. He remembered how, when he was returning home and thinking of her in the silence of the night, he said to himself "If!--" This "if," by which at that time he had referred to the past, to the impossible, now applied to an actual state of things, but not exactly such a one as he had then supposed. Freedom by itself was little to him now. "She will obey her mother," he thought. "She will marry Panshine. But even if she refuses him--will it not be just the same as far as I am concerned?" Passing at that moment in front of a looking-glass, he just glanced at his face in it, and then shrugged his shoulders. Amid such thoughts as these the day passed swiftly by. The evening arrived, and Lavretsky went to the Kalitines. He walked fast until he drew near to the house, but then he slackened his pace. Panshine's carriage was standing before the door. "Well," thought Lavretsky, as he entered the house, "I will not be selfish." No one met him in-doors, and all seemed quiet in the drawing-room. He opened the door, and found that Madame Kalitine was playing piquet with Panshine. That gentleman bowed to him silently, while the lady of the house exclaimed, "Well, this is an unexpected pleasure," and slightly frowned. Lavretsky sat down beside her and began looking at her cards. "So you can play piquet?" she asked, with a shade of secret vexation in her voice, and then remarked that she had thrown away a wrong card.