The maids served without noise; and to avoid looking at his wife and looking within himself, he followed with his eyes first one and then the other without being able to distinguish between them.  They moved silently about, without one being able to see by what means, for their skirts touched the carpet all round; they glided here and there, receded, approached, rigid in black and white, with precise gestures, and no life in their faces, like a pair of marionettes in mourning; and their air of wooden unconcern struck him as unnatural, suspicious, irremediably hostile.  That such people’s feelings or judgment could affect one in any way, had never occurred to him before.  He understood they had no prospects, no principles—­no refinement and no power.  But now he had become so debased that he could not even attempt to disguise from himself his yearning to know the secret thoughts of his servants.  Several times he looked up covertly at the faces of those girls.  Impossible to know.  They changed his plates and utterly ignored his existence.  What impenetrable duplicity.  Women—­nothing but women round him.  Impossible to know.  He experienced that heart-probing, fiery sense of dangerous loneliness, which sometimes assails the courage of a solitary adventurer in an unexplored country.  The sight of a man’s face—­he felt—­of any man’s face, would have been a profound relief.  One would know then—­something—­could understand. . . .  He would engage a butler as soon as possible.  And then the end of that dinner—­which had seemed to have been going on for hours—­the end came, taking him violently by surprise, as though he had expected in the natural course of events to sit at that table for ever and ever.

But upstairs in the drawing-room he became the victim of a restless fate, that would, on no account, permit him to sit down.  She had sunk on a low easy-chair, and taking up from a small table at her elbow a fan with ivory leaves, shaded her face from the fire.  The coals glowed without a flame; and upon the red glow the vertical bars of the grate stood out at her feet, black and curved, like the charred ribs of a consumed sacrifice.  Far off, a lamp perched on a slim brass rod, burned under a wide shade of crimson silk:  the centre, within the shadows of the large room, of a fiery twilight that had in the warm quality of its tint something delicate, refined and infernal.  His soft footfalls and the subdued beat of the clock on the high mantel-piece answered each other regularly—­as if time and himself, engaged in a measured contest, had been pacing together through the infernal delicacy of twilight towards a mysterious goal.