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fatter, his varicose ulcer had
subsided, leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits
of coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had
ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the
telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a
secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that
they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What
mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it
was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a
world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr.
Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He usually
stopped to talk with Mr. Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs.
The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other
hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the
tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his
meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient
gramophone wit