For Christmas
 

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