position. 'A screw—not a man,' so he spoke of his employer; 'people in a subordinate position are so much dirt to him, of no consequence whatever; and yet it's not so long since he was under the yoke himself. Nothing but cruelty and covetousness. It's a bondage worse than the government's! And all the trade here rests on swindling and flourishes on nothing else!'
Hearing such dispiriting utterances, Punin sighed expressively, assented, shook his head up and down, and from side to side; Musa maintained a stubborn silence. . . . She was obviously fretted by the doubt, what I was, whether I was a discreet person or a gossip. And if I were discreet, whether it was not with some afterthought in my mind. Her dark, swift, restless eyes fairly flashed to and fro under their half-drooping lids. Only once she glanced at me, but so inquisitively, so searchingly, almost viciously . . . I positively started. Baburin scarcely talked to her at all; but whenever he did address her, there was a note of austere, hardly fatherly, tenderness in his voice.
Punin, on the contrary, was continually joking with Musa; she responded unwillingly, however. He called her little snow-maiden, little snowflake.
'Why do you give Musa Pavlovna such names?' I asked.
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