II

near the door; not quite at home, their eyes still filled with the puzzled preoccupation with which they had wandered and gazed, the relief of their customary conversation held back until they should have paid, out of their weary bewilderment some tribute of suitable comment; looking about the room, watching in separate uneasiness for material to carry them past the insoluble problem. They were unchanged. But the readers stood out anew; the world they had made for her was broken up. Those who came in twos and sat at the more sequestered tables, maddening her with endless conversations at cross purposes from unconsidered assumptions, were defeated. Their voices were covered by Mr. Shatov’s fluent monologue, and though her own voice, sounding startlingly in the room, seemed at once only an exclamatory unpractised reproduction of these accustomed voices, changing already their aspect and making her judgment of them rock insecurely in her mind, it was threaded into his unconcerned reality and would presently be real.