He remained silent as the man stormed out and just sipped his tea for a moment. The man had obviously been speaking with Julia about O'Brien to have such a change in opinion about him. Winston had been looking up to him not the day before and now he thought of O'Brien as a man with no heart, or rather, not even a man at all. A feeling snuck into O'Brien's counciousness of displeasure, the closest he had felt to sadness for a long time, and he shifted in his seat before he got up and went outside, walking over to Winston with his hands in his pockets, defences down.
"I once told you, Winston, that you and I were alike, apart from the fact that you were insane,"He spoke softly, "I meant that. Do you not think I, too, need to adjust? Do you not think that I, too, am having difficulties? You look to me as the authority figure I once was, I see it in your eyes, and I am not that anymore. You and I are the more the same than ever, and I fear that means I am going insane." It was difficult for the man to admit such things, but yet, he knew it was in his nature. He had lost long ago his ability to find faults that were boons to being in the Party. His lack of ease at adjusting to this new world would have been welcome in the Party-it would be loyalty to his job if he could not change from being perfectly suited for it. But a voice in the back of his head said, or rather yelled, so it would be heard, that he had the power to adapt, he had the ability. He had been retrained before, he could retrain himself now. The Party was still his ideal, was still his lifestyle, but he would have to find a way to live without it. To live without his life, as it were.