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on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the servant showed Julia and Winston in.
Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be able to speak. They had
done it, they had done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and
sheer folly to arrive together; though it was true that they had come by different routes and only met on
O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into such a place needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on
very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into
the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the
richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the
silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro
—everything was intimidating. Although he had a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at
every step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner,
demand his papers, and order him to get out. O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of
them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped,
completely expressionless face which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which he
led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean.
That too was intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls
were not grimy from the contact of human bodies.
O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying it intently. His heavy
face, bent down so that one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For
perhaps twenty seconds he sat without stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite toward him and rapped
out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:
"Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion contained item six
doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stop unproceed constructionwise antegetting plusful
estimates machinery overheads stop end message."
He rose deliberately from his chair and came toward them across the soundless carpet. A little of
the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him with the Newspeak words, but his
expression was grimmer than usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that
Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to
him quite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that
O'Brien was any kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal
remark; beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a dream. He could not even fall back
on the pretense that he had come to borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia's presence was
impossible to explain. As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped,
turned aside, and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was
too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.
"You can turn it off!" he said.