No . . . it's a case of sympathy . . . and antipathy.'
Marianna glanced up from under her eyelids at Madame Sipyagin . . . and Madame Sipyagin glanced at her.
These two women did not like each other. In comparison with her aunt, Marianna might almost have been called 'a plain little thing.' She had a round face, a large hawk nose, grey eyes, also large and very clear, thin eyebrows, thin lips. She had cropped her thick dark-brown hair, and she looked unsociable. But about her whole personality there was something vigorous and bold, something stirring and passionate. Her feet and hands were tiny; her strongly knit, supple little body recalled the Florentine statuettes of the sixteenth century; she moved lightly and gracefully.
Marianna's position in the Sipyagins' household was a rather difficult one. Her father, a very clever and energetic man of half-Polish extraction, gained the rank of a general, but was suddenly ruined by being detected in a gigantic fraud on the government; he was brought to trial . . . condemned, deprived of his rank and his nobility, and sent to Siberia. Afterwards he was pardoned . . . and brought back; but he did not succeed in climbing up again, and
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