Here and there on the river fishing-boats were scattered about, setting their nets for the night.  In one of these boats was the festive party, playing on home-made violins and violoncellos.

Olga Mihalovna was sitting at the rudder; she was smiling affably and talking a great deal to entertain her visitors, while she glanced stealthily at her husband.  He was ahead of them all, standing up punting with one oar.  The light sharp-nosed canoe, which all the guests called the “death-trap”—­while Pyotr Dmitritch, for some reason, called it Penderaklia—­flew along quickly; it had a brisk, crafty expression, as though it hated its heavy occupant and was looking out for a favourable moment to glide away from under his feet.  Olga Mihalovna kept looking at her husband, and she loathed his good looks which attracted every one, the back of his head, his attitude, his familiar manner with women; she hated all the women sitting in the boat with her, was jealous, and at the same time was trembling every minute in terror that the frail craft would upset and cause an accident.

“Take care, Pyotr!” she cried, while her heart fluttered with terror.  “Sit down!  We believe in your courage without all that!”

She was worried, too, by the people who were in the boat with her.  They were all ordinary good sort of people like thousands of others, but now each one of them struck her as exceptional and evil.  In each one of them she saw nothing but falsity.  “That young man,” she thought, “rowing, in gold-rimmed spectacles, with chestnut hair and a nice-looking beard:  he is a mamma’s darling, rich, and well-fed, and always fortunate, and every one considers him an honourable, free-thinking, advanced man.  It’s not a year since he left the University and came to live in the district, but he already talks of himself as ‘we active members of the Zemstvo.’  But in another year he will be bored like so many others and go off to Petersburg, and to justify running away, will tell every one that the Zemstvos are good-for-nothing, and that he has been deceived in them.  While from the other boat his young wife keeps her eyes fixed on him, and believes that he is ‘an active member of the Zemstvo,’ just as in a year she will believe that the Zemstvo is good-for-nothing.  And that stout, carefully shaven gentleman in the straw hat with the broad ribbon, with an expensive cigar in his mouth:  he is fond of saying, ‘It is time to put away dreams and set to work!’ He has Yorkshire pigs, Butler’s hives, rape-seed, pine-apples, a dairy, a cheese factory, Italian bookkeeping by double entry; but every summer he sells his timber and mortgages part of his land to spend the autumn with his mistress in the Crimea.  And there’s Uncle Nikolay Nikolaitch, who has quarrelled with Pyotr Dmitritch, and yet for some reason does not go home.”