achievements had earned it. He knew only that he often saw their names on the magazine covers on newsstands. If Lillian resented his attitude, he thought, she was right. If her manner toward him was objectionable, he deserved it. If his family called him heartless, it was true.
He had never spared himself in any issue. When a problem came up at the mills, his first concern was to discover what error he had made; he did not search for anyone’s fault but his own; it was of himself that he demanded perfection. He would grant himself no mercy now; he took the blame. But at the mills, it prompted him to action in an immediate impulse to correct the error; now, it had no effect... Just a few more minutes, he thought, standing against the mirror, his eyes closed.
He could not stop the thing in his mind that went on throwing words at him; it was like trying to plug a broken hydrant with his bare hands.
Stinging jets, part words, part pictures, kept shooting at his brain...
Hours of it, he thought, hours to spend watching the eyes of the guests getting heavy with boredom if they were sober or glazing into an imbecile stare if they weren’t, and pretend that he noticed neither, and strain to think of something to say to them, when he had nothing to say—while he needed hours of inquiry to find a successor for the superintendent of his rolling mills who had resigned suddenly, without explanation—he had to do it at once— men of that sort were so hard to find—and if anything happened to break the flow of the rolling mills—it was the Taggart rail that was being rolled... He remembered the silent reproach, the look of accusation, long-bearing patience and scorn, which he always saw in the eyes of his family when they caught some evidence of his passion for his business—and the futility of his silence, of his hope that they would not think Rearden Steel meant as much to him as it did—like a drunkard pretending indifference to liquor, among people who watch him with the scornful amusement of their full knowledge of his shameful weakness... “I heard you last night coming home at two in the morning, where were you?” his mother saying to him at the dinner table, and Lillian answering, “Why, at the mills, of course,” as another wife would say, “At the corner saloon.”... Or Lillian asking him, the hint of a wise half-smile on her face, “What were you doing in New York yesterday?” “It was a banquet with the boys.” “Business?” “Yes.” “Of course”—and Lillian turning away, nothing more, except the shameful realization that he had almost hoped she would think he had attended some sort of obscene stag party...
An ore carrier had gone down in a storm on Lake Michigan, with thousands of tons of Rearden ore—those boats were falling apart—if he didn’t take it upon himself to help them obtain the replacements they needed, the owners of the line would go bankrupt, and there was no other line left in operation on Lake Michigan... “That nook?” said Lillian, pointing to an arrangement of settees and coffee tables in their drawing room. “Why, no, Henry, it’s not new, but I suppose I should feel flattered that three weeks is all it took you to notice it. It’s my own adaptation of the morning room of a famous French palace—but things like that can’t possibly interest you, darling, there’s no stock market quotation on them, none whatever.”... The order for copper, which he had placed six months ago, had not been delivered, the promised date had been postponed three tunes—“We can’t help it, Mr. Rearden”—he had to find another company to deal with, the supply of copper was becoming increasingly uncertain... Philip did not smile, when he looked up in the midst of a speech he was making to some friend of their mother’s, about some organization he had joined, but there was something that suggested a smile of superiority in the loose muscles of his face when he said, “No, you wouldn’t care for this, it’s not business, Henry, not business at all, it’s a strictly non-commercial endeavor.”... That contractor in Detroit, with the job of rebuilding a large factory, was considering structural shapes of Rearden Metal—he should fly to Detroit and speak to him in person—he should have done it a week ago—he could have done it tonight... “You’re not listening,” said his mother at the breakfast table, when his mind wandered to the current coal price index, while she was telling him about the dream she’d had last night. “You’ve never listened to a living soul. You’re not interested in anything but yourself. You don’t give a damn about people, not about a single human creature on God’s earth.”...
The typed pages lying on the desk in his office were a report on the tests of an airplane motor made of Rearden Metal—perhaps of all things on earth, the one he wanted most at this moment was to read it—it had lain on his desk, untouched, for three days, he had had no time for it—why didn’t he do it now and—
He shook his head violently, opening his eyes, stepping back from the mirror.
He tried to reach for the shirt studs. He saw his hand reaching, instead, for the pile of mail on his dresser. It was mail picked as urgent, it had to be read tonight, but he had had no time to read it in the office.
His secretary had stuffed it into his pocket on his way out. He had thrown it there while undressing.
A newspaper clipping fluttered down to the floor. It was an editorial which his secretary had marked with an angry stash in red pencil. It was entitled “Equalization of Opportunity.” He had to read it: there had been too much talk about this issue in the last three months, ominously too much, He read it, with the sound of voices and forced laughter coming from downstairs, reminding him that the guests were arriving, that the party had started and that he would face the bitter, reproachful glances of his family when he came down.
The editorial said that at a time of dwindling production, shrinking markets and vanishing opportunities to make a living, it was unfair to let one man hoard several business enterprises, while others had none; it was destructive to let a few corner all the resources, leaving others no chance; competition was essential to society, and it was society’s duty to see that no competitor ever rose beyond the range of anybody who wanted to compete with him. The editorial predicted the passage of a bill which had been proposed, a bill forbidding any person or corporation to own more than one business concern.
Wesley Mouch, his Washington man, had told Rearden not to worry; the fight would be stiff, he had said, but the bill would be defeated.
Rearden understood nothing about that kind of fight. He left it to Mouch and his staff. He could barely find time to skim through the reports from Washington and to sign the checks which Mouch requested for the battle.
Rearden did not believe that the bill would pass. He was incapable of believing it. Having dealt with the clean reality of metals, technology, production all his life, he had acquired the conviction that one had to concern oneself with the rational, not the insane—that one had to seek that which was right, because the right answer always won—that the senseless, the wrong, the monstrously unjust could not work, could not succeed, could do nothing but defeat itself. A battle against a thing such as that bill seemed preposterous and faintly embarrassing to him, as if he were suddenly asked to compete with a man who calculated steel mixtures by the formulas of numerology.
He had told himself that the issue was dangerous. But the loudest screaming of the most hysterical editorial roused no emotion in him—while a variation of a decimal point in a laboratory report on a test of Rearden Metal made him leap to his feet in eagerness or apprehension.
He had no energy to spare for anything else.
He crumpled the editorial and threw it into the wastebasket. He felt the leaden approach of that exhaustion which he never felt at his job, the exhaustion that seemed to wait for him and catch him the moment he turned to other concerns. He felt as if he were incapable of any desire except a desperate longing for sleep, He told himself that he had to attend the party—that his family had the right to demand it of him—that he had to learn to like their kind of pleasure, for their sake, not his own.
He wondered why this was a motive that had no power to impel him. Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically. What was happening to him?—he wondered. The impossible conflict of feeling reluctance to do that which was right—wasn’t it the basic formula of moral corruption? To recognize one’s guilt, yet feel nothing but the coldest, most profound indifference—wasn’t it a betrayal of that which had been the motor of his life-course and of his pride?
He gave himself no time to seek an answer. He finished dressing, quickly, pitilessly.
Holding himself erect, his tall figure moving with the unstressed, unhurried confidence of habitual authority, the white of a fine handkerchief in the breast pocket of his black dinner jacket, he walked slowly down the stairs to the drawing room, looking—to the satisfaction of the dowagers who watched him—like the perfect figure of a great industrialist.
He saw Lillian at the foot of the stairs. The patrician lines of a lemon-yellow Empire evening gown stressed her graceful body, and she stood like a person proudly in control of her proper background.
He smiled; he liked to see her happy; it gave some reasonable justification to the party.
He approached her—and stopped. She had always shown good taste in her use of jewelry, never wearing too much of it. But tonight she wore an ostentatious display: a diamond necklace, earrings, rings and brooches. Her arms looked conspicuously bare by contrast. On her right wrist, as sole ornament, she wore the bracelet of Rearden
