She made a tightening, sidewise movement with her lips, the equivalent of a shrug, and walked into the bedroom.
He stood at the window, looking down at the streaming roofs of automobiles, letting his eyes rest on something while his faculty of sight was disconnected. His mind was still focused on the crowd in the ballroom downstairs and on two figures in that crowd. But as his living room remained on the edge of his vision, so the sense of some action he had to perform remained on the edge of his consciousness. He grasped it for a moment—it was the fact that he had to remove his evening clothes—but farther beyond the edge there was the feeling of reluctance to undress in the presence of a strange woman in his bedroom, and he forgot it again in the next moment.
Lillian came out, as trimly groomed as she had arrived, the beige traveling suit outlining her figure with efficient tightness, the hat tilted over half a head of hair set in waves. She carried her suitcase, swinging it a little, as if in demonstration of her ability to carry it.
He reached over mechanically and took the suitcase out of her hand.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to take you to the station.”
“Like this? You haven’t changed your clothes.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You don’t have to escort me. I’m quite able to find my own way. If you have business appointments tomorrow, you’d better go to bed.”
He did not answer, but walked to the door, held it open for her and followed her to the elevator.
They remained silent when they rode in a taxicab to the station. At such moments as he remembered her presence, he noticed that she sat efficiently straight, almost flaunting the perfection of her poise; she seemed alertly awake and contented, as if she were starting out on a purposeful journey of early morning.
The cab stopped at the entrance to the Taggart Terminal. The bright lights flooding the great glass doorway transformed the lateness of the hour into a sense of active, timeless security. Lillian jumped lightly out of the cab, saying, “No, no, you don’t have to get out, drive on back.
Will you be home for dinner tomorrow—or next month?”
“I’ll telephone you,” he said.
She waved her gloved hand at him and disappeared into the lights of the entrance. As the cab started forward, he gave the driver the address of Dagny’s apartment.
The apartment was dark when he entered, but the door to her bedroom was half-open and he heard her voice saying, “Hello, Hank.”
He walked in, asking, “Were you asleep?”
“No.”
He switched on the light. She lay in bed, her head propped by the pillow, her hair falling smoothly to her shoulders, as if she had not moved for a long time; but her face was untroubled. She looked like a schoolgirl, with the tailored collar of a pale blue nightgown lying severely high at the base of her throat; the nightgown’s front was a deliberate contrast to the severity, a spread of pale blue embroidery that looked luxuriously adult and feminine.
He sat down on the edge of the bed—and she smiled, noticing that the stern formality of his full dress clothes made his action so simply, naturally intimate. He smiled in answer. He had come, prepared to reject the forgiveness she had granted him at the party, as one rejects a favor from too generous an adversary. Instead, he reached out suddenly and moved his hand over her forehead, down the line of her hair, in a gesture of protective tenderness, in the sudden feeling of how delicately childlike she was, this adversary who had borne the constant challenge of his strength, but who should have had his protection.
“You’re carrying too much,” he said, “and it’s I who make it harder for you...”
“No, Hank, you don’t and you know it.”
“I know that you have the strength not to let it hurt you, but it’s a strength I have no right to call upon. Yet I do, and I have no solution, no atonement to offer. I can only admit that I know it and that there’s no way I can ask you to forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
“I had no right to bring her into your presence.”
“It did not hurt me. Only...”
“Yes?”
“... only seeing the way you suffered... was hard to see.”
“I don’t think that suffering makes up for anything, but whatever I felt, I didn’t suffer enough, if there’s one thing I loathe, it’s to speak of my own suffering—that should be no one’s concern but mine. But if you want to know, since you know it already—yes, it was hell for me. And I wish it were worse. At least, I’m not letting myself get away with it.”
He said it sternly, without emotion, as an impersonal verdict upon himself. She smiled, in amused sadness, she took his hand and pressed it to her lips, and shook her head in rejection of the verdict, holding her face hidden against his hand.
“What do you mean?” he asked softly.
“Nothing...” Then she raised her head and said firmly, “Hank, I knew you were married. I knew what I was doing. I chose to do it.
There’s nothing that you owe me, no duty that you have to consider.”
He shook his head slowly, in protest.
“Hank, I want nothing from you except what you wish to give me.
Do you remember that you called me a trader once? I want you to come to me seeking nothing but your own enjoyment. So long as you wish to remain married, whatever your reason, I have no right to resent it. My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me—not by your suffering or mine. I don’t accept sacrifices and I don’t make them. If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse. If you asked me to give up the railroad, I’d leave you. If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud. You don’t do it in business, Hank.
Don’t do it in your own life.”
Like a dim sound track under her words, he was hearing the words said to him by Lillian; he was seeing the distance between the two, the difference in what they sought from him and from life.
“Dagny, what do you think of my marriage?”
“I have no right to think of it.”
“You must have wondered about it.”
“I did... before I came to Ellis Wyatt’s house. Not since.”
“You’ve never asked me a question about it.”
“And won’t.”
He was silent for a moment, then said, looking straight at her, underscoring his first rejection of the privacy she had always granted him, “There’s one thing I want you to know: I have not touched her since... Ellis Wyatt’s house.”
“I’m glad.”
“Did you think I could?”
“I’ve never permitted myself to wonder about that.”
“Dagny, do you mean that if I had, you... you’d accept that, too?”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t hate it?”
“I’d hate it more than I can tell you. But if that were your choice, I would accept it. I want you, Hank.”
He took her hand and raised it to his lips, she felt the moment’s struggle in his body, in the sudden movement with which he came down, half-collapsing, and let his mouth cling to her shoulder. Then he pulled her forward, he pulled the length of her body in the pale blue nightgown to lie stretched across his knees, he held it with an unsmiling violence, as if in hatred for her words and as if they were the words he had most wanted to hear.
He bent his face down to hers and she heard the question that had come again and again in the nights of the
