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The room was only vacant for a few moments; then the bedroom door opened and the charlady was exposed to view. Irony holding her eyebrows high up on her shallow forehead, and her eyes, which first had seen the light in County Mayo, derisively illuminated, she surveyed the empty breakfast table. As if exaggerating her own rachitic mode of locomotion, shooting her head in and out, she rattled over noisily to the sink.

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When, crossing the landing, René entered his study, he was trembling slightly. But the tension soon relaxed, out of direct contact with his wife. This was the first occasion on which disagreements between them had taken the form of a 'row'. His training had led to his locking up any irascibility in a frigid silence. On this occasion it had taken a violent form with great unexpectedness; what had enabled it to do so called for an immediate investigation. Why had the control, by now second nature, been found wanting? If his attitude to Hester had hardened into a critical analysis, he was still very attached to her upon the sexual level. Being a man of great natural severity, an eroticism which did not live very easily with it was instinctively resented: and the mate who automatically classified under the heading 'Erotics' was in danger, from the start, of being regarded as a frivolous interloper by his dominant intellectuality.