While Olga Mihalovna was making the tea and pouring out the first glasses, the visitors were busy with the liqueurs and sweet things.  Then there was the general commotion usual at picnics over drinking tea, very wearisome and exhausting for the hostess.  Grigory and Vassily had hardly had time to take the glasses round before hands were being stretched out to Olga Mihalovna with empty glasses.  One asked for no sugar, another wanted it stronger, another weak, a fourth declined another glass.  And all this Olga Mihalovna had to remember, and then to call, “Ivan Petrovitch, is it without sugar for you?” or, “Gentlemen, which of you wanted it weak?” But the guest who had asked for weak tea, or no sugar, had by now forgotten it, and, absorbed in agreeable conversation, took the first glass that came.  Depressed-looking figures wandered like shadows at a little distance from the table, pretending to look for mushrooms in the grass, or reading the labels on the boxes—­these were those for whom there were not glasses enough.  “Have you had tea?” Olga Mihalovna kept asking, and the guest so addressed begged her not to trouble, and said, “I will wait,” though it would have suited her better for the visitors not to wait but to make haste.

Some, absorbed in conversation, drank their tea slowly, keeping their glasses for half an hour; others, especially some who had drunk a good deal at dinner, would not leave the table, and kept on drinking glass after glass, so that Olga Mihalovna scarcely had time to fill them.  One jocular young man sipped his tea through a lump of sugar, and kept saying, “Sinful man that I am, I love to indulge myself with the Chinese herb.”  He kept asking with a heavy sigh:  “Another tiny dish of tea more, if you please.”  He drank a great deal, nibbled his sugar, and thought it all very amusing and original, and imagined that he was doing a clever imitation of a Russian merchant.  None of them understood that these trifles were agonizing to their hostess, and, indeed, it was hard to understand it, as Olga Mihalovna went on all the time smiling affably and talking nonsense.

But she felt ill. . . .  She was irritated by the crowd of people, the laughter, the questions, the jocular young man, the footmen harassed and run off their legs, the children who hung round the table; she was irritated at Vata’s being like Nata, at Kolya’s being like Mitya, so that one could not tell which of them had had tea and which of them had not.  She felt that her smile of forced affability was passing into an expression of anger, and she felt every minute as though she would burst into tears.

“Rain, my friends,” cried some one.

Every one looked at the sky.

“Yes, it really is rain . . .”  Pyotr Dmitritch assented, and wiped his cheek.

Only a few drops were falling from the sky—­the real rain had not begun yet; but the company abandoned their tea and made haste to get off.  At first they all wanted to drive home in the carriages, but changed their minds and made for the boats.  On the pretext that she had to hasten home to give directions about the supper, Olga Mihalovna asked to be excused for leaving the others, and went home in the carriage.