year behind them, always torn out of him involuntarily, always as a sudden break that betrayed his constant, secret torture: “Who was your first man?”
She strained back, trying to draw away from him, but he held her.
“No, Hank,” she said, her face hard.
The brief, taut movement of his lips was a smile. “I know that you won’t answer it, but I won’t stop asking —because that is what I’ll never accept.”
“Ask yourself why you won’t accept it.”
He answered, his hand moving slowly from her breasts to her knees, as if stressing his ownership and hating it, “Because... the things you’ve permitted me to do... I didn’t think you could, not ever, not even for me... but to find that you did, and more: that you had permitted another man, had wanted him to, had—”
“Do you understand what you’re saying? That you’ve never accepted my wanting you, either—you’ve never accepted that I should want you, just as I should have wanted him, once.”
He said, his voice low, “That’s true.”
She tore herself away from him with a brusque, twisting movement, she stood up, but she stood looking down at him with a faint smile, and she said softly, “Do you know your only real guilt? With the greatest capacity for it, you’ve never learned to enjoy yourself. You’ve always rejected your own pleasure too easily. You’ve been willing to bear too much.”
“He said that, too.”
“Who?”
“Francisco d’Anconia.”
He wondered why he had the impression that the name shocked her and that she answered an instant too late, “He said that to you?”
“We were talking about quite a different subject.”
In a moment, she said calmly, “I saw you talking to him. Which one of you was insulting the other, this time?”
“We weren’t. Dagny, what do you think of him?”
“I think that he’s done it intentionally—that smash-up we’re in for, tomorrow.”
“I know he has. Still, what do you think of him as a person?”
“I don’t know. I ought to think that he’s the most depraved person I’ve ever met.”
“You ought to? But you don’t?”
“No. I can’t quite make myself feel certain of it.”
He smiled. “That’s what’s strange about him. I know that he’s a liar, a loafer, a cheap playboy, the most viciously irresponsible waste of a human being I ever imagined possible. Yet, when I look at him, I feel that if ever there was a man to whom I would entrust my life, he’s the one.”
She gasped. “Hank, are you saying that you like him?”
“I’m saying that I didn’t know what it meant, to like a man, I didn’t know how much I missed it—until I met him.”
“Good God, Hank, you’ve fallen for him!”
“Yes—I think I have.” He smiled. “Why does it frighten you?”
“Because... because I think he’s going to hurt you in some terrible way... and the more you see in him, the harder it will be to bear... and it will take you a long time to get over it, if ever...
I feel that I ought to warn you against him, but I can’t—because I’m certain of nothing about him, not even whether he’s the greatest or the lowest man on earth.”
“I’m certain of nothing about him—except that I like him.”
“But think of what he’s done. It’s not Jim and Boyle that he’s hurt, it’s you and me and Ken Danagger and the rest of us, because Jim’s gang will merely take it out on us—and it’s going to be another disaster, like the Wyatt fire.”
“Yes... yes, like the Wyatt fire. But, you know, I don’t think I care too much about that. What’s one more disaster? Everything’s going anyway, it’s only a question of a little faster or a little slower, all that’s left for us ahead is to keep the ship afloat as long as we can and then go down with it.”
“Is that his excuse for himself? Is that what he’s made you feel?”
“No. Oh no! That’s the feeling I lose when I speak to him. The strange thing is what he does make me feel.”
“What?”
“Hope.”
She nodded, in helpless wonder, knowing that she had felt it, too.
“I don’t know why,” he said. “But I look at people and they seem to be made of nothing but pain. He’s not. You’re not. That terrible hopelessness that’s all around us, I lose it only in his presence. And here.
Nowhere else.”
She came back to him and slipped down to sit at his feet, pressing her face to his knees. “Hank, we still have so much ahead of us... and so much right now... ”
He looked at the shape of pale blue silk huddled against the black of his clothes—he bent down to her—he said, his voice low, “Dagny... the things I said to you that morning in Ellis Wyatt’s house... I think I was lying to myself.”
“I know it.”
Through a gray drizzle of rain, the calendar above the roofs said: September 3, and a clock on another tower said: 10:40, as Rearden rode back to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. The cab’s radio was spitting out shrilly the sounds of a panic-tinged voice announcing the crash of d’Anconia Copper.
Rearden leaned wearily against the seat: the disaster seemed to be no more than a stale news story read long ago. He felt nothing, except an uncomfortable sense of impropriety at finding himself out in the morning streets, dressed in evening clothes. He felt no desire to return from the world he had left to the world he saw drizzling past the windows of the taxi.
He turned the key in the door of his hotel suite, hoping to get back to a desk as fast as possible and have to see nothing around him.
They hit his consciousness together: the breakfast table—the door to his bedroom, open upon the sight of a bed that had been slept in—and Lillian’s voice saying, “Good morning, Henry.”
She sat in an armchair, wearing the suit she had worn yesterday, without the jacket or hat; her white blouse looked smugly crisp. There were remnants of a breakfast on the table. She was smoking a cigarette, with the air and pose of a long, patient vigil.
As he stood still, she took the time to cross her legs and settle down more comfortably, then asked, “Aren’t you going to say anything, Henry?”
He stood like a man in military uniform at some official proceedings where emotions could not be permitted to exist. “It is for you to speak.”
“Aren’t you going to try to justify yourself?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you going to start begging my forgiveness?”
“There is no reason why you should forgive me. There is nothing for me to add. You know the truth. Now it is up to you.”
She chuckled, stretching, rubbing her shoulder blades against the chair’s back. “Didn’t you expect to be caught, sooner or later?” she asked. “If a man like you stays pure as a monk for over a year, didn’t you think that I might begin to suspect the reason? It’s funny, though, that that famous brain of yours didn’t prevent you from getting caught as simply as this.” She waved at the room, at the breakfast table. “I felt certain that you weren’t going to return here, last night. And it wasn’t difficult or expensive at all to find out from a hotel employee, this morning, that you haven’t spent a night in these rooms in the past year.”
He said nothing.
“The man of stainless steel!” She laughed. “The man of achievement and honor who’s so much better than the rest of us! Does she dance in the chorus or is she a manicurist in an exclusive barber shop patronized by millionaires?”
He remained silent.
