Olga Mihalovna looked at the other boats, and there, too, she saw only uninteresting, queer creatures, affected or stupid people.  She thought of all the people she knew in the district, and could not remember one person of whom one could say or think anything good.  They all seemed to her mediocre, insipid, unintelligent, narrow, false, heartless; they all said what they did not think, and did what they did not want to.  Dreariness and despair were stifling her; she longed to leave off smiling, to leap up and cry out, “I am sick of you,” and then jump out and swim to the bank.

“I say, let’s take Pyotr Dmitritch in tow!” some one shouted.

“In tow, in tow!” the others chimed in.  “Olga Mihalovna, take your husband in tow.”

To take him in tow, Olga Mihalovna, who was steering, had to seize the right moment and to catch bold of his boat by the chain at the beak.  When she bent over to the chain Pyotr Dmitritch frowned and looked at her in alarm.

“I hope you won’t catch cold,” he said.

“If you are uneasy about me and the child, why do you torment me?” thought Olga Mihalovna.

Pyotr Dmitritch acknowledged himself vanquished, and, not caring to be towed, jumped from the Penderaklia into the boat which was overful already, and jumped so carelessly that the boat lurched violently, and every one cried out in terror.

“He did that to please the ladies,” thought Olga Mihalovna; “he knows it’s charming.”  Her hands and feet began trembling, as she supposed, from boredom, vexation from the strain of smiling and the discomfort she felt all over her body.  And to conceal this trembling from her guests, she tried to talk more loudly, to laugh, to move.

“If I suddenly begin to cry,” she thought, “I shall say I have toothache. . . .”

But at last the boats reached the “Island of Good Hope,” as they called the peninsula formed by a bend in the river at an acute angle, covered with a copse of old birch-trees, oaks, willows, and poplars.  The tables were already laid under the trees; the samovars were smoking, and Vassily and Grigory, in their swallow-tails and white knitted gloves, were already busy with the tea-things.  On the other bank, opposite the “Island of Good Hope,” there stood the carriages which had come with the provisions.  The baskets and parcels of provisions were carried across to the island in a little boat like the Penderaklia.  The footmen, the coachmen, and even the peasant who was sitting in the boat, had the solemn expression befitting a name-day such as one only sees in children and servants.