She heard their voices, animated now in an eager to and fro, hers contralto, softly modulated, level and indifferent in an easy swiftness of speech; his higher, dry and chippy and staccato; the two together a broken tide of musical Russian words, rich under the cheerless hotel gas-light. It would flow on for a while and presently break and die down. Michael's social concentration would not be equal to a public drawing-room, a prolonged sitting on sofas. Coffee would come. They would linger a little over it, eagerness would drop from their voices, the business of reflecting over their first headlong communications would be setting in for each one of them, separating them into individualities, and suddenly Michael would make a break. For she could hear they were not talking of abstract things. Revolutionary ideas would be, between him and Lintoff, an old battlefield they had learned to ignore. They were just listening, in excited entrancement, to the sounds of each other's voices, their eyes on old scenes, explaining, repeating themselves, in the turmoil of their attentiveness ... each ready to stop halfway through a sentence to catch at an outbreaking voice. Michael's voice was still rich and eager. His years had fallen away from him; only now and again the memory of his settled surrounding and relentless daily work caught at his tone, levelling it out. Coffee had come. Someone asked an abrupt question and waited in a silence. She glanced across. A tall narrow man, narrow slender height, in black, bearded, a narrow straw-gold beard below bright red lips. Unsympathetic; vaguely familiar. Him she must have observed in the dim group in the hall during Michael's phrases of introduction. "Nu; da;" Michael was saying cordially, "Lintoff suggests we go upstairs," he continued, to her, politely. He looked pleased and easy; unfatigued.