rs,
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."

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