...of an encounter

She climbs to the second floor without seeing anything, or to the third. She knocks softly three times at a door, and immediately goes in without waiting for an answer. It is not the agent who is here to receive her today, it is the man she knows only by a nickname: the "Old Man" (though he is probably only sixty), whose real name is Edouard Manneret. He is alone. His back is to the door by which she has closed behind her, still leaning against it. He is sitting in a chair, at his desk. He is writing. He pays no attention to the young girl, whose arrival he does not even seem to have noticed, although she has not taken any special precautions to avoid making noise; but her movements are naturally silent, and it is possible that the man has really not heard anyone come in. Without doing anything to indicate her presence, she waits for him to decide to look toward her, which probably takes some time.

But she is then (immediately afterward or a little later?) facing him, both of them standing in a dark corner of the room, motionless and mute; and it is the servant girl who is standing with her back to the wall, as if she had slowly retreated there out of mistrust or fear of the Old Man who, two steps from her is at least a head taller. And now she is leaning over the desk from which he still has not moved; she has rested one hand on the green leather top whose worn surface disappears almost entirely under a clutter of papers, and with the other hand - the right one - she holds onto the brass rim that protects the edge of the mahogany surface; in front of her, the man, still sitting in his chair, has not even raised his eyes toward his visitor; he stares at the delicate fingers with their red lacquered nails resting on a manuscript page of business stationery only three-quarters covered with a very small, close and regular handwriting without erasure or mistake; the word which the servant girl's forefinger seems to be pointing to is the verb "represents" (third person singular of the present indicative); a few lines lower, the last sentence has remained unfinished: "would tell, upon his return from a trip"... He has not found the word that came next.

[La Maison de Rendez-vous, Robbe-Grillet, A.]