CHAPTER V THE CLIMAX OF THE D'ANCONIAS

The newspaper was the first thing she noticed. It was clutched tightly in Eddie's hand, as he entered her office. She glanced up at his face: it was tense and bewildered.  "Dagny, are you very busy?"  "Why?"  "I know that you don't like to talk about him. But there's something here I think you ought to see."  She extended her hand silently for the newspaper.  The story on the front page announced that upon taking over the San Sebastian Mines, the government of the People's State of Mexico had discovered that they were worthless-blatantly, totally, hopelessly worthless. There was nothing to justify the five years of work and the millions spent; nothing but empty excavations, laboriously cut. The few traces of copper were not worth the effort of extracting them. No great deposits of metal existed or could be expected to exist there, and there were no indications that could have permitted anyone to be deluded. The government of the People's State of Mexico was holding emergency sessions about their discovery, in an uproar of indignation; they felt that they had been cheated.  Watching her, Eddie knew that Dagny sat looking at the newspaper long after she had finished reading. He knew that he had been right to feel a hint of fear, even though he could not tell what frightened him about that story.  He waited. She raised her head. She did not look at him. Her eyes were fixed, intent in concentration, as if trying to discern something at a great distance.  He said, his voice low, "Francisco is not a fool. Whatever else he may be, no matter what depravity he's sunk to-and I've given up trying to figure out why-he is not a fool. He couldn't have made a mistake of this kind. It is not possible. I don't understand it."  "I'm beginning to."  She sat up, jolted upright by a sudden movement that ran through her body like a shudder. She said: "Phone him at the Wayne-Falkland and tell the bastard that I want to see him."  "Dagny," he said sadly, reproachfully, "it's Frisco d'Anconia."  "It was."  She walked through the early twilight of the city streets to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. "He says, any time you wish," Eddie had told her. The first lights appeared in a few windows high under the clouds.  The skyscrapers looked like abandoned lighthouses sending feeble, dying signals out into an empty sea where no ships moved any longer.  A few snowflakes came down, past the dark windows of empty stores, to melt in the mud of the sidewalks. A string of red lanterns cut the street, going off into the murky distance.  She wondered why she felt that she wanted to run, that she should be running; no, not down this street; down a green hillside in the blazing sun to the road on the edge of the Hudson, at the foot of the Taggart estate. That was the way she always ran when Eddie yelled, "It's Frisco d'Anconia!" and they both flew down the hill to the car approaching on the road below.  He was the only guest whose arrival was an event in their childhood, their biggest event. The running to meet him had become part of a contest among the three of them. There was a birch tree on the hillside, halfway between the road and the house; Dagny and Eddie tried to get past the tree, before Francisco could race up the hill to meet them. On all the many days of his arrivals, in all the many summers, they never reached the birch tree; Francisco reached it first and stopped them when he was way past it. Francisco always won, as he always won everything.  His parents were old friends of the Taggart family. He was an only son and he was being brought up all over the world; his father, it was said, wanted' him to consider the world as his future domain.  Dagny and Eddie could never be certain of where he would spend his winter; but once a year, every summer, a stern South American tutor brought him for a month to the Taggart estate.  Francisco found it natural that the Taggart children should be chosen as his companions: they were the crown heirs of Taggart Transcontinental, as he was of d'Anconia Copper. "We are the only aristocracy left in the world-the aristocracy of money," he said to Dagny once, when he was fourteen. "It's the only real aristocracy, if people understood what it means, which they don't."  He had a caste system of his own: to him, the Taggart children were not Jim and Dagny, but Dagny and Eddie. He seldom volunteered to notice Jim's existence. Eddie asked him once, "Francisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?"  He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long lime is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one." He pronounced his name as if he wished his listeners to be struck in the face and knighted by the sound of it.  Sebastian d'Anconia, his ancestor, had left Spain many centuries ago, at a time when Spain was the most powerful country on earth and his was one of Spain's proudest figures. He left, because the  lord of the Inquisition did not approve of his manner of thinking and suggested, at a court banquet, that he change it. Sebastian d'Anconia threw the contents of his wine glass at the face of the lord of the Inquisition, and escaped before he could be seized. He left behind him his fortune, his estate, his marble palace and the girl he loved-and he sailed to a new world.  His first estate in Argentina was a wooden shack in the foothills of the Andes. The sun blazed like a beacon on the silver coat-of-arms of the d'Anconias, nailed over the door of the shack, while Sebastian d'Anconia dug for the copper of his first mine. He spent years, pickax in hand, breaking rock from sunrise till darkness, with the help of a few stray derelicts: deserters from the armies of his countrymen, escaped convicts, starving Indians.  Fifteen years after he left Spain, Sebastian d'Anconia sent for the girl he loved; she had waited for him. When she arrived, she found the silver coat-of-arms above the entrance of a marble palace, the gardens of a great estate, and mountains slashed by pits of red ore in the distance. He carried her in his arms across the threshold of his home. He looked younger than when she had seen him last.  "My ancestor and yours," Francisco told Dagny, "would have liked each other."  Through the years of her childhood, Dagny lived in the future-in the world she expected to find, where she would not have to feel contempt or boredom. But for one month each year, she was free. For one month, she could live in the present. When she raced down the hill to meet Francisco d'Anconia, it was a release from prison.  "Hi, Slug!"  "Hi, Frisco!"  They had both resented the nicknames, at first. She had asked him angrily, "What do you think you mean?" He had answered, "In case you don't know it, 'Slug' means a great fire in a locomotive firebox."  "Where did you pick that up?" "From the gentlemen along the Taggart iron." He spoke five languages, and he spoke English without a trace of accent, a precise, cultured English deliberately mixed with slang. She had retaliated by calling him Frisco. He had laughed, amused and annoyed. "If you barbarians had to degrade the name of a great city of yours, you could at least refrain from doing it to me." But they had grown to like the nicknames.  It had started in the days of their second summer together, when he was twelve years old and she was ten. That summer, Francisco began vanishing every morning for some purpose nobody could discover. He went off on his bicycle before dawn, and returned in time to appear at the white and crystal table set for lunch on the terrace, his manner courteously punctual and a little too innocent. He laughed, refusing to answer, when Dagny and Eddie questioned him. They tried to follow him once, through the cold, pre-morning darkness, but they gave it up; no one could track him when he did not want to be tracked.  After a while, Mrs. Taggart began, to worry and decided to investigate. She never learned how he had managed to by-pass all the child-labor laws, but she found Francisco working-by an unofficial deal with the dispatcher-as a call boy for Taggart Transcontinental, at a division point ten miles away. The dispatcher was stupefied by her personal visit; he had no idea that his call boy was a house guest of the Taggarts. The boy was known to the local railroad crews as Frankie, and Mrs. Taggart preferred not to enlighten them about his full name.  She merely explained that he was working without his parents' permission and had to quit at once. The dispatcher was sorry to lose him; Frankie, he said, was the best call boy they had ever had. "I'd sure like to keep him on. Maybe we could make a deal with his parents?" he suggested. "I'm afraid not." said Mrs. Taggart faintly.  "Francisco," she asked, when she brought him home, "what would your father say about this, if he knew?"  "My father would ask whether I was good at the job or not.  That's all he'd want to know."  "Come now, I'm serious."  Francisco was looking at her politely, his courteous manner suggesting centuries of breeding and drawing rooms; but something in his eyes made her feel uncertain about the politeness. "Last winter," he answered, "I shipped out as cabin boy on a cargo steamer that carried d'Anconia copper. My father looked for me for three months, but that's all he asked me when I came back."  "So that's how you spend your winters?" said Jim Taggart. Jim's smile had a touch of triumph, the triumph of finding cause to feel contempt.  "That was last winter," Francisco answered pleasantly, with no change in the innocent, casual tone of his voice. "The winter before last I spent in Madrid, at the home of the Duke of Alba."  "Why did you want to work on a railroad?" asked Dagny.  They stood looking at each other: hers was a glance of admiration, his of mockery; but it was not the mockery of malice-it was the laughter of a salute.  "To learn what it's like, Slug," he answered, "and to tell you that I've had a job with Taggart Transcontinental before you did."  Dagny and Eddie spent their winters trying to master some new skill, in order to astonish Francisco and beat him, for once. They never succeeded. When they showed him how to hit a ball with a bat, a game he had never played before, he watched them for a few minutes, then said, "I think I get the idea. Let me try." He took the bat and sent the ball flying over a line of oak trees far at the end of the field.  When Jim was given a motorboat for his birthday, they all stood on the river landing, watching the lesson, while an instructor showed Jim how to run it. None of them had ever driven a motorboat before. The sparkling white craft, shaped like a bullet, kept staggering clumsily across the water, its wake a long record of shivering, its motor choking with hiccoughs, while the instructor, seated beside him, kept seizing the wheel out of Jim's hands. For no apparent reason, Jim raised his head suddenly and yelled at Francisco, "Do you think you can do it any better?" "I can do it." "Try it!"  When the boat came back and its two occupants stepped out, Francisco slipped behind the wheel. "Wait a moment," he said to the instructor, who remained on the landing. "Let me take a look at this."  Then, before the instructor had time to move, the boat shot out to the middle of the river, as if fired from a gun. It was streaking away before they grasped what they were seeing. As it went shrinking into the distance and sunlight, Dagny's picture of it was three straight lines: its wake, the long shriek of its motor, and the aim of the driver at its wheel.  She noticed the strange expression of her father's face as he looked at the vanishing speedboat. He said nothing; he just stood looking. She remembered that she had seen him look that way once before. It was when he inspected a complex system of pulleys which Francisco, aged twelve, had erected to make an elevator to the top of a rock; he was teaching Dagny and Eddie to dive from the rock into the Hudson. Francisco's notes of calculation were still scattered about on the ground; her father picked them up, looked at them, then asked, "Francisco, how many years of algebra have you had?" "Two years." "Who taught you to do this?" "Oh, that's just something I figured out." She did not know that what her father held on the crumpled sheets of paper was the crude version of a differential equation.  The heirs of Sebastian d'Anconia had been an unbroken line of first sons, who knew how to bear his name. It was a tradition of the family that the man to disgrace them would be the heir who died, leaving the d'Anconia fortune no greater than he had received it. Throughout the generations, that disgrace had not come. An Argentinian legend said that the hand of a d'Anconia had the miraculous power of the saints-  only it was not the power to heal, but the power to produce.  The d'Anconia heirs had been men of unusual ability, but none of them could match what Francisco d'Anconia promised to become. It was as if the centuries had sifted the family's qualities through a fine mesh, had discarded the irrelevant, the inconsequential, the weak, and had let nothing through except pure talent; as if chance, for once, had achieved an entity devoid of the accidental.  Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better than anyone else, and he did it without effort. There was no boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison. His attitude was not: "I can do it better than you," but simply: "I can do it." What he meant by doing was doing superlatively.  No matter what discipline was required of him by his father's exacting plan for his education, no matter what subject he was ordered to study, Francisco mastered it with effortless amusement. His father adored him, but concealed it carefully, as he concealed the pride of knowing that he was bringing up the most brilliant phenomenon of a brilliant family line.  Francisco, it was said, was to be the climax of the d'Anconias.  "I don't know what sort of motto the d'Anconias have on their family crest," Mrs. Taggart said once, "but I'm sure that Francisco will change it to 'What for?' " It was the first question he asked about any activity proposed to him-and nothing would make him act, if he found no valid answer. He flew through the days of his summer month like a rocket, but if one stopped him in mid-flight, he could always name the purpose of his every random moment. Two things were impossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly.  "Let's find out" was the motive he gave to Dagny and Eddie for anything he undertook, or "Let's make it." These were his only forms of enjoyment.  "I can do it," he said, when he was building his elevator, clinging to the side of a cliff, driving metal wedges into rock, his arms moving with an expert's rhythm, drops of blood slipping, unnoticed, from under a bandage on his wrist. "No, we can't take turns, Eddie, you're not big enough yet to handle a hammer. Just cart the weeds off and keep the way clear for me, I'll do the rest. . . . What blood? Oh, that's nothing, just a cut I got yesterday. Dagny, run to the house and bring me a clean bandage."  Jim watched them. They left him alone, but they often saw him standing in the distance, watching Francisco with a peculiar kind of intensity.  He seldom spoke in Francisco's presence. But he would corner Dagny and he would smile derisively, saying, "All those airs you put on, pretending that you're an iron woman with a mind of her own! You're a spineless dishrag, that's all you are. It's disgusting, the way you let that conceited punk order you about. He can twist you around his little finger. You haven't any pride at all. The way you run when he whistles and wait on him! Why don't you shine his shoes?" "Because he hasn't told me to," she answered.  Francisco could win any game in any local contest. He never entered contests. He could have ruled the junior country club. He never came within sight of their clubhouse, ignoring their eager attempts to enroll the most famous heir in the world. Dagny and Eddie were his only friends. They could not tell whether they owned him or were owned by him completely; it made no difference: either concept made them happy.  The three of them set out every morning on adventures of their own kind. Once, an elderly professor of literature, Mrs. Taggart's friend, saw them on top of a pile in a junk yard, dismantling the carcass of an automobile. He stopped, shook his head and said to Francisco, "A young man of your position ought to spend his time in libraries, absorbing the culture of the world." "What do you think I'm doing?" asked Francisco.  There were no factories in the neighborhood, but Francisco taught Dagny and Eddie to steal rides on Taggart trains to distant towns, where they climbed fences into mill yards or hung on window sills, watching machinery as other children watched movies. "When I run Taggart Transcontinental . . ." Dagny would say at times. "When I run d'Anconia Copper . . ." said Francisco. They never had to explain the rest to each other; they knew each other's goal and motive.  Railroad conductors caught them, once in a while. Then a stationmaster a hundred miles away would telephone Mrs. Taggart: "We've got three young tramps here who say that they are-" "Yes," Mrs. Taggart would sigh, "they are. Please send them back."  "Francisco," Eddie asked him once, as they stood by the tracks of the Taggart station, "you've been just about everywhere in the world.  What's the most important thing on earth?" "This," answered Francisco, pointing to the emblem TT on the front of an engine. He added, "I wish I could have met Nat Taggart."  He noticed Dagny's glance at him. He said nothing else. But minutes later, when they went on through the woods, down a narrow path of damp earth, ferns and sunlight, he said, "Dagny, I'll always bow to a coat-of-arms. I'll always worship the symbols of nobility. Am I not supposed to be an aristocrat? Only I don't give a damn for moth-eaten turrets and tenth-hand unicorns. The coats-of-arms of our day are to be found on billboards and in the ads of popular magazines." "What do you mean?" asked Eddie. "Industrial trademarks, Eddie," he answered.  Francisco was fifteen years old, that summer.  "When I run d'Anconia Copper . . ." "I'm studying mining and mineralogy, because I must be ready for the time when I run d'Anconia Copper. . . ." "I'm studying electrical engineering, because power companies are the best customers of d'Anconia Copper. . . ." "I'm going to study philosophy, because I'll need it to protect d'Anconia Copper. . . ."  "Don't you ever think of anything but d'Anconia Copper?" Jim asked him once.  "No."  "It seems to me that there are other things in the world."  "Let others think about them."  "Isn't that a very selfish attitude?"  "It is."  "What are you after?"  "Money."  "Don't you have enough?"  "In his lifetime, every one of my ancestors raised the production of d'Anconia Copper by about ten per cent. I intend to raise it by one hundred."  "What for?" Jim asked, in sarcastic imitation of Francisco's voice.  "When I die, I hope to go to heaven-whatever the hell that is- and I want to be able to afford the price of admission."  "Virtue is the price of admission," Jim said haughtily.  "That's what I mean, James. So I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all-that I was a man who made money."  "Any grafter can make money."  "James, you ought to discover some day that words have an exact meaning."  Francisco smiled; it was a smile of radiant mockery. Watching them, Dagny thought suddenly of the difference between Francisco and her brother Jim. Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great.  She noticed the particular quality of Francisco's smile again, one night, when she sat with him and Eddie at a bonfire they had built in the woods. The glow of the fire enclosed them within a fence of broken, moving strips that held pieces of tree trunks, branches and distant stars.  She felt as if there were nothing beyond that fence, nothing but black emptiness, with the hint of some breath-stopping, frightening promise . . . like the future. But the future, she thought, would be like Francisco's smile, there was the key to it, the advance warning of its nature -in his face in the firelight under the pine branches-and suddenly she felt an unbearable happiness, unbearable because it was too full and she had no way to express it. She glanced at Eddie. He was looking at Francisco. In some quiet way of his own, Eddie felt as she did.  "Why do you like Francisco?" she asked him weeks later, when Francisco was gone.  Eddie looked astonished; it had never occurred to him that the feeling could be questioned. He said, "He makes me feel safe."  She said, "He makes me expect excitement and danger."  Francisco was sixteen, next summer, the day when she stood alone with him on the summit of a cliff by the river, their shorts and shirts torn in their climb to the top. They stood looking down the Hudson; they had heard that on clear days one could see New York in the distance. But they saw only a haze made of three different kinds of light merging together: the river, the sky and the sun.  She knelt on a rock, leaning forward, trying to catch some hint of the city, the wind blowing her hair across her eyes. She glanced back over her shoulder-and saw that Francisco was not looking at the distance: he stood looking at her. It was an odd glance, intent and unsmiling. She remained still for a moment, her hands spread flat on the rock, her arms tensed to support the weight of her body; inexplicably, his glance made her aware of her pose, of her shoulder showing through the torn shirt, of her long, scratched, sunburned legs slanting from the rock to the ground. She stood up angrily and backed away from him. And while throwing her head up, resentment in her eyes to meet the sternness in his, while feeling certain that his was a glance of condemnation and hostility, she heard herself asking him, a tone of smiling defiance in her voice: "What do you like about me?"  He laughed; she wondered, aghast, what had made her say it. He answered, "There's what I like about you," pointing to the glittering rails of the Taggart station in the distance.  "It's not mine," she said, disappointed.  "What I like is that it's going to be."  She smiled, conceding his victory by being openly delighted. She did not know why he had looked at her so strangely; but she felt that he had seen some connection, which she could not grasp, between her body and something within her that would give her the strength to rule those rails some day.  He said brusquely, "Let's see if we can see New York," and jerked her by the arm to the edge of the cliff. She thought that he did not notice that he twisted her arm in a peculiar way, holding it down along the length of his side; it made her stand pressed against him, and she felt the warmth of the sun in the skin of his legs against hers. They looked far out into the distance, but they saw nothing ahead except a haze of light.  When Francisco left, that summer, she thought that his departure was; like the crossing of a frontier which ended his childhood: he was to start college, that fall. Her turn would come next. She felt an eager impatience touched by the excitement of fear, as if he had leaped into an unknown danger. It was like the moment, years ago, when she had seen him dive first from a rock into the Hudson, had seen him vanish under the black water and had stood, knowing that he would reappear in an instant and that it would then be her turn to follow.  She dismissed the fear; dangers, to Francisco, were merely opportunities for another brilliant performance; there were no battles he could lose, no enemies to beat him. And then she thought of a remark she had heard a few years earlier. It was a strange remark-and it was strange that the words had remained in her mind, even though she had thought them senseless at the time. The man who said it was an old professor of mathematics, a friend of her father, who came to their country house for just that one visit. She liked his face, and she could still see the peculiar sadness in his eyes when he said to her father one evening, sitting on the terrace in the fading light, pointing to Francisco's figure in the garden, "That boy is vulnerable. He has too great a capacity for joy. What will he do with it in a world where there's so little occasion for it?"  Francisco went to a great American school, which his father had chosen for him long ago. It was the most distinguished institution of learning left in the world, the Patrick Henry University of Cleveland.  He did not come to visit her in New York, that winter, even though he was only a night's journey away. They did not write to each other, they had never done it. But she knew that he would come back to the country for one summer month.  There were a few times, that winter, when she felt an undefined apprehension: the professor's words kept returning to her mind, as a warning which she could not explain. She dismissed them. When she thought of Francisco, she felt the steadying assurance that she would have another month as an advance against the future, as a proof that the world she saw ahead was real, even though it was not the world of those around her.  "Hi, Slug!"  "Hi, Frisco!"  Standing on the hillside, in the first moment of seeing him again, she grasped suddenly the nature of that world which they, together, held against all others. It was only an instant's pause, she felt her cotton skirt beating in the wind against her knees, felt the sun on her eyelids, and the upward thrust of such an immense relief that she ground her feet into the grass under her sandals, because she thought she would rise, weightless, through the wind.  It was a sudden sense of freedom and safety-because she realized that she knew nothing about the events of his life, had never known and would never need to know. The world of chance-of families, meals, schools, people, of aimless people dragging the load of some unknown guilt-was not theirs, could not change him, could not matter. He and she had never spoken of the things that happened to them, but only of what they thought and of what they would do. . . . She looked at him silently, as if a voice within her were saying: Not the things that are, but the things we'll make . . . We are not to be stopped, you and I . . .  Forgive me the fear, if I thought I could lose you to them-forgive me the doubt, they'll never reach you-I'll never be afraid for you again. . . .  He, too, stood looking at her for a moment-and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning to point at the birch tree behind him and saying in the tone of their childhood game: "I wish you'd learn to run faster. I'll always have to wait for you."  "Will you wait for me?" she asked gaily.  He answered, without smiling, "Always."  As they went up the hill to the house, he spoke to Eddie, while she walked silently by his side. She felt that there was a new reticence between them which, strangely, was a new kind of intimacy.  She did not question him about the university. Days later, she asked him only whether he liked it.  "They're teaching a lot of drivel nowadays," he answered, "but there are a few courses I like."  "Have you made any friends there?"  "Two."  He told her nothing else.  Jim was approaching his senior year in a college in New York. His studies had given him a manner of odd, quavering belligerence, as if he had found a new weapon. He addressed Francisco once, without provocation, stopping him in the middle of the lawn to say in a tone of aggressive self-righteousness: "I think that now that you've reached college age, you ought to learn something about ideals. It's time to forget your selfish greed and give some thought to your social responsibilities, because I think that all those millions you're going to inherit are not for your personal pleasure, they are a trust for the benefit of the underprivileged and the poor, because I think that the person who doesn't realize this is the most depraved type of human being."  Francisco answered courteously, "It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener."  Dagny asked him, as they walked away, "Are there many men like Jim in the world?"  Francisco laughed. "A great many."  "Don't you mind it?"  "No. I don't have to deal with them. Why do you ask that?"  "Because I think they're dangerous in some way . . . I don't know how . . ."  "Good God, Dagny! Do you expect me to be afraid of an object like James?"  It was days later, when they were alone, walking through the woods on the shore of the river, that she asked: "Francisco, what's the most depraved type of human being?"  "The man without a purpose."  She was looking at the straight shafts of the trees that stood against the great, sudden, shining spread of space beyond. The forest was dim and cool, but the outer branches caught the hot, silver sunrays from the water. She wondered why she enjoyed the sight, when she had never taken any notice of the country around her, why she was so aware of her enjoyment, of her movements, of her body in the process of walking.  She did not want to look at Francisco. She felt that his presence seemed more intensely real when she kept her eyes away from him, almost as if the stressed awareness of herself came from him, like the sunlight from the water.  "You think you're good, don't you?" he asked.  "I always did," she answered defiantly, without turning.  "Well, let me see you prove it. Let me see how far you'll rise with Taggart Transcontinental. No matter how good you are, I'll expect you to wring everything you've got, trying to be still better. And when you've worn yourself out to reach a goal, I'll expect you to start for another."  "Why do you think that I care to prove anything to you?" she asked.  "Want me to answer?"  "No," she whispered, her eyes fixed upon the other shore of the river in the distance.  She heard him chuckling, and after a while he said, "Dagny, there's nothing of any importance in life-except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean."  "I know it now. But . . . Francisco, why are you and I the only ones who seem to know it?"  "Why should you care about the others?"  "Because I like to understand things, and there's something about people that I can't understand."  "What?"  "Well, I've always been unpopular in school and it didn't bother me, but now I've discovered the reason. It's an impossible kind of reason. They dislike me, not because I do things badly, but because I do them well. They dislike me because I've always had the best grades in the class. I don't even have to study. I always get A's. Do you suppose I should try to get D's for a change and become the most popular girl in school?"  Francisco stopped, looked at her and slapped her face.  What she felt was contained in a single instant, while the ground rocked under her feet, in a single blast of emotion within her. She knew that she would have killed any other person who struck her; she felt the violent fury which would have given her the strength for it-and as violent a pleasure that Francisco had done it. She felt pleasure from the dull, hot pain in her cheek and from the taste of blood in the corner of her mouth. She felt pleasure in what she suddenly grasped about him, about herself and about his motive.  She braced her feet to stop the dizziness, she held her head straight and stood facing him in the consciousness of a new power, feeling herself his equal for the first time, looking at him with a mocking smile of triumph.  "Did I hurt you as much as that?" she asked.  He looked astonished; the question and the smile were not those of a child. He answered, "Yes-if it pleases you."  "It does."  "Don't ever do that again. Don't crack jokes of that kind."  "Don't be a fool. Whatever made you think that I cared about being popular?"  "When you grow up, you'll understand what sort of unspeakable thing you said."  "I understand it now."  He turned abruptly, took out his handkerchief and dipped it in the water of the river. "Come here," he ordered.  She laughed, stepping back, "Oh no. I want to keep it as it is. I hope it swells terribly. I like it."  He looked at her for a long moment. He said slowly, very earnestly, "Dagny, you're wonderful."  "I thought that you always thought so," she answered, her voice insolently casual.  When she came home, she told her mother that she had cut her lip by falling against a rock. It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share, Next summer, when Francisco came, she was sixteen. She started running down the hill to meet him, but stopped abruptly. He saw it, stopped, and they stood for a moment, looking at each other across the distance of a long, green slope. It was he who walked up toward her, walked very slowly, while she stood waiting.  When he approached, she smiled innocently, as if unconscious of any contest intended or won.  "You might like to know," she said, "that I have a job on the railroad.  Night operator at Rockdale."  He laughed. "All right, Taggart Transcontinental, now it's a race.  Let's see who'll do greater honor, you-to Nat Taggart, or I-to Sebastian d'Anconia."  That winter, she stripped her life down to the bright simplicity of a geometrical drawing: a few straight lines-to and from the engineering college in the city each day, to and from her job at Rockdale Station each night-and the closed circle of her room, a room littered with diagrams of motors, blueprints of steel structures, and railroad timetables.  Mrs. Taggart watched her daughter in unhappy bewilderment. She could have forgiven all the omissions, but one: Dagny showed no sign of interest in men, no romantic inclination whatever. Mrs. Taggart did not approve of extremes; she had been prepared to contend with an extreme of the opposite kind, if necessary; she found herself thinking that this was worse. She felt embarrassed when she had to admit that her daughter, at seventeen, did not have a single admirer.  "Dagny and Francisco d'Anconia?" she said, smiting ruefully, in answer to the curiosity of her friends. "Oh no, it's not a romance. It's an international industrial cartel of some kind. That's all they seem to care about."  Mrs. Taggart heard James say one evening, in the presence of guests, a peculiar tone of satisfaction in his voice, "Dagny, even though you were named after her, you really look more like Nat Taggart than like that first Dagny Taggart, the famous beauty who was his wife." Mrs. Taggart did not know which offended her most: that James said it or that Dagny accepted it happily as a compliment.  She would never have a chance, thought Mrs. Taggart, to form some conception of her own daughter. Dagny was only a figure hurrying in and out of the apartment, a slim figure in a leather jacket, with a raised collar, a short skirt and long show-girl legs. She walked, cutting across a room, with a masculine, straight-line abruptness, but she had a peculiar grace of motion that was swift, tense and oddly, challengingly feminine.  At times, catching a glimpse of Dagny's face, Mrs. Taggart caught an expression which she could not quite define: it was much more than gaiety, it was the look of such an untouched purity of enjoyment that she found it abnormal, too: no young girl could be so insensitive as to have discovered no sadness in life. Her daughter, she concluded, was incapable of emotion.  "Dagny.," she asked once, "don't you ever want to have a good time?" Dagny looked at her incredulously and answered, "What do you think I'm having?"  The decision to give her daughter a formal debut cost Mrs. Taggart a great deal of anxious thought. She did not know whether she was introducing to New York society Miss Dagny Taggart of the Social Register or the night operator of Rockdale Station; she was inclined to believe it was more truly this last; and she felt certain that Dagny would reject the idea of such an occasion. She was astonished when Dagny accepted it with inexplicable eagerness, for once like a child.  She was astonished again, when she saw Dagny dressed for the party, It was the first feminine dress she had ever worn-a gown of white chiffon with a huge skirt that floated like a cloud. Mrs. Taggart had expected her to look like a preposterous contrast. Dagny looked like a beauty. She seemed both older and more radiantly innocent than usual; standing in front of a mirror, she held her head as Nat Taggart's wife would have held it.  "Dagny," Mrs. Taggart said gently, reproachfully, "do you see how beautiful you can be when you want to?"  "Yes," said Dagny, without any astonishment.  The ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel had been decorated under Mrs. Taggart's direction; she had an artist's taste, and the setting of that evening was her masterpiece. "Dagny, there are things I would like you to learn to notice," she said, "lights, colors, flowers, music. They are not as negligible as you might think."  "I've never thought they're negligible," Dagny answered happily. For once, Mrs. Taggart felt a bond between them; Dagny was looking at her with a child's grateful trust. "They're the things that make life beautiful," said Mrs. Taggart. "I want this evening to be very beautiful for you, Dagny. The first ball is the most romantic event of one's life."  To Mrs. Taggart, the greatest surprise was the moment when she saw Dagny standing under the lights, looking at the ballroom. This was not a child, not a girl, but a woman of such confident, dangerous power that Mrs. Taggart stared at her with shocked admiration. In an age of casual, cynical, indifferent routine, among people who held themselves as if they were not flesh, but meat-Dagny's bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one's half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure. And this-thought Mrs. Taggart, smiling-was the girl she had believed to be devoid of sexual capacity. She felt an immense relief, and a touch of amusement at the thought that a discovery of this kind should make her feel relieved.  The relief lasted only for a few hours. At the end of the evening, she saw Dagny in a corner of the ballroom, sitting on a balustrade as if it were a fence rail, her legs dangling under the chiffon skirt as if she were dressed in slacks. She was talking to a couple of helpless young men, her face contemptuously empty.  Neither Dagny nor Mrs. Taggart said a word when they rode home together. But hours later, on a sudden impulse, Mrs. Taggart went to her daughter's room. Dagny stood by the window, still wearing the white evening gown; it looked like a cloud supporting a body that now seemed too thin for it, a small body with sagging shoulders. Beyond the window, the clouds were gray in the first light of morning.  When Dagny turned, Mrs. Taggart saw only puzzled helplessness in her face; the face was calm, but something about it made Mrs. Taggart wish she had not wished that her daughter should discover sadness.  "Mother, do they think it's exactly in reverse?" she asked.  "What?" asked Mrs. Taggart, bewildered.  "The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?"  "Darling, what do you mean?"  "There wasn't a person there who enjoyed it," she said, her voice lifeless, "or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant."  "Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay."  "How? By being stupid?"  "I mean, for instance, didn't you enjoy meeting the young men?"  "What men? There wasn't a man there I couldn't squash ten of."  Days later, sitting at her desk at Rockdale Station, feeling lightheartedly at home, Dagny thought of the party and shrugged in contemptuous reproach at her own disappointment. She looked up: it was spring and there were leaves on the tree branches in the darkness outside; the air was still and warm. She asked herself what she had expected from that party. She did not know. But she felt it again, here, now, as she sat slouched over a battered desk, looking out into the darkness: a sense of expectation without object, rising through her body, slowly, like a warm liquid. She slumped forward across the desk, lazily, feeling neither exhaustion nor desire to work.  When Francisco came, that summer, she told him about the party and about her disappointment. He listened silently, looking at her for the first time with that glance of unmoving mockery which he reserved for others, a glance that seemed to see too much. She felt as if he heard, in her words, more than she knew she told him.  She saw the same glance in his eyes on the evening when she left him too early. They were alone, sitting on the shore of the river.  She had another hour before she was due at Rockdale. There were long, thin strips of fire in the sky, and red sparks floating lazily on the water. He had been silent for a long time, when she rose abruptly and told him that she had to go. He did not try to stop her; he leaned back, his elbows in the grass, and looked at her without moving; his glance seemed to say that he knew her motive. Hurrying angrily up the slope to the house, she wondered what had made her leave; she did not know; it had been a sudden restlessness that came from a feeling she did not identify till now: a feeling of expectation.  Each night, she drove the five miles from the country house to Rockdale. She came back at dawn, slept a few hours and got up with the rest of the household. She felt no desire to sleep. Undressing for bed in the first rays of the sun, she felt a tense, joyous, causeless impatience to face the day that was starting.  She saw Francisco's mocking glance again, across the net of a tennis court. She did not remember the beginning of that game; they had often played tennis together and he had always won. She did not know at what moment she decided that she would win, this time.  When she became aware of it, it was no longer a decision or a wish, but a quiet fury rising within her. She did not know why she had to win; she did not know why it seemed so crucially, urgently necessary; she knew only that she had to and that she would.  It seemed easy to play; it was as if her will had vanished and someone's power were playing for her. She watched Francisco's figure --a tall, swift figure, the suntan of his arms stressed by his short white shirt sleeves. She felt an arrogant pleasure in seeing the skill of his movements, because this was the thing which she would beat, so that his every expert gesture became her victory, and the brilliant competence of his body became the triumph of hers.  She felt the rising pain of exhaustion-not knowing that it was pain, feeling it only in sudden stabs that made her aware of some part of her body for an instant, to be forgotten in the next: her arm socket- her shoulder blades-her hips, with the white shorts sticking to her skin -the muscles of her legs, when she leaped to meet the ball, but did not remember whether she came down to touch the ground again-her eyelids, when the sky went dark red and the ball came at her through the darkness like a whirling white flame-the thin, hot wire that shot from her ankle, up her back, and went on shooting straight across the air, driving the ball at Francisco's figure. . . . She felt an exultant pleasure-because every stab of pain begun in her body had to end in his, because he was being exhausted as she was-what she did to herself, she was doing it also to him-this was what he felt-this was what she drove him to-it was not her pain that she felt or her body, but his.  In the moments when she saw his face, she saw that he was laughing.  He was looking at her as if he understood. He was playing, not to win, but to make it harder for her-sending his shots wild to make her run -losing points to see her twist her body in an agonizing backhand-  standing still, letting her think he would miss, only to let his arm shoot out casually at the last moment and send the ball back with such force that she knew she would miss it. She felt as if she could not move again, not ever-and it was strange to find herself landing suddenly at the other side of the court, smashing the ball in time, smashing it as if she wished it to burst to pieces, as if she wished it were Francisco's face.  Just once more, she thought, even if the next one would crack the bones of her arm . . . Just once more, even if the air which she forced down in gasps past her tight, swollen throat, would be stopped altogether . . . Then she felt nothing, no pain, no muscles, only the thought that she had to beat him, to see him exhausted, to see him collapse, and then she would be free to die in the next moment.  She won. Perhaps it was his laughing that made him lose, for once.  He walked to the net, while she stood still, and threw his racket across, at her feet, as if knowing that this was what she wanted. He walked out of the court and fell down on the grass of the lawn, collapsing, his head on his arm.  She approached him slowly. She stood over him, looking down at his body stretched at her feet, looking at his sweat-drenched shirt and the strands of his hair spilled across his arm. He raised his head. His glance moved slowly up the line of her legs, to her shorts, to her blouse, to her eyes. It was a mocking glance that seemed to see straight through her clothes and through her mind. And it seemed to say that he had won.  She sat at her desk at Rockdale, that night, alone in the old station building, looking at the sky in the window. It was the hour she liked best, when the top panes of the window grew lighter, and the rails of the track outside became threads of blurred silver across the lower panes. She turned off her lamp and watched the vast, soundless motion of light over a motionless earth. Things stood still, not a leaf trembled on the branches, while the sky slowly lost its color and became an expanse that looked like a spread of glowing water.  Her telephone was silent at this hour, almost as if movement had stopped everywhere along the system. She heard steps approaching outside, suddenly, close to the door. Francisco came in. He had never come here before, but she was not astonished to see him.  "What are you doing up at this hour?" she asked.  "I didn't feel like sleeping."  "How did you get here? I didn't hear your car."  "I walked."  Moments passed before she realized that she had not asked him why he came and that she did not want to ask it.  He wandered through the room, looking at the clusters of waybills that hung on the walls, at the calendar with a picture of the Taggart Comet caught in a proud surge of motion toward the onlooker. He seemed casually at home, as if he felt that the place belonged to them, as they always felt wherever they went together. But he did not seem to want to talk. He asked a few questions about her job, then kept silent.  As the light grew outside, movement grew down on the line and the telephone started ringing in the silence. She turned to her work. He sat in a corner, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair, waiting.  She worked swiftly, feeling inordinately clear-headed. She found pleasure in the rapid precision of her hands. She concentrated on the sharp, bright sound of the phone, on the figures of train numbers, car numbers, order numbers. She was conscious of nothing else.  But when a thin sheet of paper fluttered down to the floor and she bent to pick it up, she was suddenly as intently conscious of that particular moment, of herself and her own movement. She noticed her gray linen skirt, the rolled sleeve of her gray blouse and her naked arm reaching down for the paper. She felt her heart stop causelessly in the kind of gasp one feels in moments of anticipation. She picked up the paper and turned back to her desk.  It was almost full daylight. A train went past the station, without stopping. In the purity of the morning light, the long line of car roofs melted into a silver string, and the train seemed suspended above the ground, not quite touching it, going past through the air. The floor of the station trembled., and glass rattled in the windows. She watched the train's flight with a smile of excitement. She glanced at Francisco: he was looking at her, with the same smile.  When the day operator arrived, she turned the station over to him, and they walked out into the morning air. The sun had not yet risen and the air seemed radiant in its stead. She felt no exhaustion. She felt as if she were just getting up.  She started toward her car, but Francisco said, "Let's walk home. We'll come for the car later."  "All right."  She was not astonished and she did not mind the prospect of walking five miles. It seemed natural; natural to the moment's peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk.  The road led through the woods. They left the highway for an old trail that went twisting among the trees across miles of untouched country. There were no traces of human existence around them. Old ruts, overgrown with grass, made human presence seem more distant, adding the distance of years to the distance of miles. A haze of twilight remained over the ground, but in the breaks between the tree trunks there were leaves that hung in patches of shining green and seemed to light the forest. The leaves hung still. They walked, alone to move through a motionless world. She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time.  They came to a clearing. It was a small hollow at the bottom of a shaft made of straight rock hillsides. A stream cut across the grass, and tree branches flowed low to the ground, like a curtain of green fluid.  The sound of the water stressed the silence. The distant cut of open sky made the place seem more hidden. Far above, on the crest of a hill, one tree caught the first rays of sunlight.  They stopped and looked at each other. She knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. He seized her, she felt her lips in his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer, and knew for the first time how much she had wanted him to do it.  She felt a moment's rebellion and a hint of fear. He held her, pressing the length of his body against hers with a tense, purposeful insistence, his hand moving over her breasts as if he were learning a proprietor's intimacy with her body, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission. She tried to pull herself away, but she only leaned back against his arms long enough to see his face and his smile, the smile that told her she had given him permission long ago. She thought that she must escape; instead, it was she who pulled his head down to find his mouth again.  She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his, that he left nothing possible to her except the thing she wanted most-to submit. She had no conscious realization of his purpose, her vague knowledge of it was wiped out, she had no power to believe it clearly, in this moment, to believe it about herself, she knew only that she was afraid-yet what she felt was as if she were crying to him: Don't ask me for it-oh, don't ask me-do it!  She braced her feet for an instant, to resist, but his mouth was pressed to hers and they went down to the ground together, never breaking their lips apart. She lay still-as the motionless, then the quivering object of an act which he did simply, unhesitatingly, as of right, the right of the unendurable pleasure it gave them.  He named what it meant to both of them in the first words he spoke afterwards. He said, "We had to learn it from each other." She looked at his long figure stretched on the grass beside her, he wore black slacks and a black shirt, her eyes stopped on the belt pulled tight across his slender waistline, and she felt the stab of an emotion that was like a gasp of pride, pride in her ownership of his body. She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this moment.  When she came home, when she lay in bed, naked because her body had become an unfamiliar possession, too precious for the touch of a nightgown, because it gave her pleasure to feel naked and to feel as if the white sheets of her bed were touched by Francisco's body-when she thought that she would not sleep, because she did not want to rest and lose the most wonderful exhaustion she had ever known-her last thought was of the times when she had wanted to express, but found no way to do it, an instant's knowledge of a feeling greater than happiness, the feeling of one's blessing upon the whole of the earth, the feeling of being in love with the fact that one exists and in this kind of world; she thought that the act she had learned was the way one expressed it. If this was a thought of the gravest importance, she did not know it; nothing could be grave in a universe from which the concept of pain had been wiped out; she was not there to weigh her conclusion; she was asleep, a faint smile on her face, in a silent, luminous room filled with the light of morning.  That summer, she met him in the woods, in hidden corners by the river, on the floor of an abandoned shack, in the cellar of the house.  These were the only times when she learned to feel a sense of beauty- by looking up at old wooden rafters or at the steel plate of an air conditioning machine that whirred tensely, rhythmically above their heads. She wore slacks or cotton summer dresses, yet she was never so feminine as when she stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her. He taught her every manner of sensuality he could invent. "Isn't it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?" he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin.  They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal. She knew the general doctrine on sex, held by people in one form or another, the doctrine that sex was an ugly weakness of man's lower nature, to be condoned regretfully. She experienced an emotion of chastity that made her shrink, not from the desires of her body, but from any contact with the minds who held this doctrine.  That winter, Francisco came to see her in New York, at unpredictable intervals. He would fly down from Cleveland, without warning, twice a week, or he would vanish for months. She would sit on the floor of her room, surrounded by charts and blueprints, she would hear a knock at her door and snap, "I'm busy!" then hear a mocking voice ask, "Are you?" and leap to her feet to throw the door open, to find him standing there. They would go to an apartment he had rented in the city, a small apartment in a quiet neighborhood. "Francisco," she asked him once, in sudden astonishment, "I'm your mistress, am I not?" He laughed. "That's what you are." She felt the pride a woman is supposed to experience at being granted the title of wife.  In the many months of his absence, she never wondered whether he was true to her or not; she knew he was. She knew, even though she was too young to know the reason, that indiscriminate desire and unselective indulgence were possible only to those who regarded sex and themselves as evil.  She knew little about Francisco's life. It was his last year in college; he seldom spoke of it, and she never questioned him. She suspected that he was working too hard, because she saw, at times, the unnaturally bright look of his face, the look of exhilaration that comes from driving one's energy beyond its limit. She laughed at him once, boasting that she was an old employee of Taggart Transcontinental, while he had not started to work for a living. He said, "My father refuses to let me work for d'Anconia Copper until I graduate." "When did you learn to be obedient?" "I must respect his wishes. He is the owner of d'Anconia Copper. . . . He is not, however, the owner of all the copper companies in the world." There was a hint of secret amusement in his smile.  She did not learn the story until the next fall, when he had graduated and returned to New York after a visit to his father in Buenos Aires.  Then he told her that he had taken two courses of education during the last four years: one at the Patrick Henry University, the other in a copper foundry on the outskirts of Cleveland. "I like to learn things for myself," he said. He had started working at the foundry as furnace boy, when he was sixteen-and now, at twenty, he owned it. He acquired his first title of property, with the aid of some inaccuracy about his age, on the day when he received his university diploma, and he sent them both to his father.  He showed her a photograph of the foundry. It was a small, grimy place, disreputable with age, battered by years of a losing struggle; above its entrance gate, like a new flag on the mast of a derelict, hung the sign: d'Anconia Copper.  The public relations man of his father's office in New York had moaned, outraged, "But, Don Francisco, you can't do that! What will the public think? That name on a dump of this kind?" "It's my name,"  Francisco had answered.  When he entered his father's office in Buenos Aires, a large room, severe and modern as a laboratory, with photographs of the properties of d'Anconia Copper as sole ornament on its walls-photographs of the greatest mines, ore docks and foundries in the world-he saw, in the place of honor, facing his father's desk, a photograph of the Cleveland foundry with the new sign above its gate.  His father's eyes moved from the photograph to Francisco's face as he stood in front of the desk.  "Isn't it a little too soon?" his father asked.  "I couldn't have stood four years of nothing but lectures."  "Where did you get the money for your first payment on that property?"  "By playing the New York stock market,"  "What? Who taught you to do that?"  "It is not difficult to judge which industrial ventures will succeed and which won't."  "Where did you get the money to play with?"  "From the allowance you sent me, sir, and from my wages."  "When did you have time to watch the stock market?"  "While I was writing a thesis on the influence-upon subsequent metaphysical systems-of Aristotle's theory of the Immovable Mover."  Francisco's stay in New York was brief, that fall. His father was sending him to Montana as assistant superintendent of a d'Anconia mine. "Oh well," he said to Dagny, smiling, "my father does not think it advisable to let me rise too fast. I would not ask him to take me on faith. If he wants a factual demonstration, I shall comply." In the spring, Francisco came back-as head of the New York office of d'Anconia Copper.  She did not see him often in the next two years. She never knew where he was, in what city or on what continent, the day after she had seen him. He always came to her unexpectedly-and she liked it, because it made him a continuous presence in her life, like the ray of a hidden light that could hit her at any moment.  Whenever she saw him in his office, she thought of his hands as she had seen them on the wheel of a motorboat: he drove his business with the same smooth, dangerous, confidently mastered speed. But one small incident remained in her mind as a shock: it did not fit him.  She saw him standing at the window of his office, one evening, looking at the brown winter twilight of the city. He did not move for a long time. His face was hard and tight; it had the look of an emotion she had never believed possible to him: of bitter, helpless anger. He said, "There's something wrong in the world. There's always been. Something no one has ever named or explained." He would not tell her what it was.  When she saw him again, no trace of that incident remained in his manner. It was spring and they stood together on the roof terrace of a restaurant, the light silk of her evening gown blowing in the wind against his tall figure in formal black clothes. They looked at the city.  In the dining room behind them, the sounds of the music were a concert etude by Richard Halley; Halley's name was not known to many, but they had discovered it and they loved his music. Francisco said, "We don't have to look for skyscrapers in the distance, do we?  We've reached them." She smiled and said, "I think we're going past them. . . . I'm almost afraid . . . we're on a speeding elevator of some kind." "Sure. Afraid of what? Let it speed. Why should there be a limit?"  He was twenty-three when his father died and he went to Buenos Aires to take over the d'Anconia estate, now his. She did not see him for three years.  He wrote to her, at first, at random intervals. He wrote about d'Anconia Copper, about the world market, about issues affecting the interests of Taggart Transcontinental. His letters were brief, written by hand, usually at night.  She was not unhappy in his absence. She, too, was making her first steps toward the control of a future kingdom. Among the leaders of industry, her father's friends, she heard it said that one had better watch the young d'Anconia heir; if that copper company had been great before, it would sweep the world now, under what his management promised to become. She smiled, without astonishment. There were moments when she felt a sudden, violent longing for him, but it was only impatience, not pain. She dismissed it, in the confident knowledge that they were both working toward a future that would bring them everything they wanted, including each other. Then his letters stopped.  She was twenty-four on that day of spring when the telephone rang on her desk, in an office of the Taggart Building. "Dagny," said a voice she recognized at once, "I'm at the Wayne-Falkland. Come to have dinner with me tonight. At seven." He said it without greeting, as if they had parted the day before. Because it took her a moment to regain the art of breathing, she realized for the first time how much that voice meant to her. "All right . . . Francisco," she answered. They needed to say nothing else. She thought, replacing the receiver, that his return was natural and as she had always expected it to happen, except that she had not expected her sudden need to pronounce his name or the stab of happiness she felt while pronouncing it.  When she entered his hotel room, that evening, she stopped short.  He stood in the middle of the room, looking at her-and she saw a smile that came slowly, involuntarily, as if he had lost the ability to smile and were astonished that he should regain it. He looked at her incredulously, not quite believing what she was or what he felt. His glance was like a plea, like the cry for help of a man who could never cry. At her entrance, he had started their old salute, he had started to say, "Hi-" but he did not finish it. Instead, after a moment, he said, "You're beautiful, Dagny." He said it as if it hurt him.  "Francisco, I-"  He shook his head, not to let her pronounce the words they had never said to each other-even though they knew that both had said and heard them in that moment.  He approached, he took her in his arms, he kissed her mouth and held her for a long time. When she looked up at his face, he was smiling down at her confidently, derisively. It was a smile that told her he was in control of himself, of her, of everything, and ordered her to forget what she had seen in that first moment. "Hi, Slug," he said.  Feeling certain of nothing except that she must not ask questions, she smiled and said, "Hi, Frisco."  She could have understood any change, but not the things she saw.  There was no sparkle of life in his face, no hint of amusement; the face had become implacable. The plea of his first smile had not been a plea of weakness; he had acquired an air of determination that seemed merciless. He acted like a man who stood straight, under the weight of an unendurable burden. She saw what she could not have believed possible: that there were lines of bitterness in his face and that he looked tortured.  "Dagny, don't be astonished by anything I do," he said, "or by anything I may ever do in the future."  That was the only explanation he granted her, then proceeded to act as if there were nothing to explain.  She could feel no more than a faint anxiety; it was impossible to feel fear for his fate or in his presence. When he laughed, she thought they were back in the woods by the Hudson: he had not changed and never would.  The dinner was served in his room. She found it amusing to face him across a table laid out with the icy formality pertaining to excessive cost, in a hotel room designed as a European palace.  The Wayne-Falkland was the most distinguished hotel left on any continent. Its style of indolent luxury, of velvet drapes, sculptured panels and candlelight, seemed a deliberate contrast to its function: no one could afford its hospitality except men who came to New York on business, to settle transactions involving the world. She noticed that the manner of the waiters who served their dinner suggested a special deference to this particular guest of the hotel, and that Francisco did not notice it. He was indifferently at home. He had long since become accustomed to the fact that he was Senor d'Anconia of d'Anconia Copper.  But she thought it strange that he did not speak about his work. She had expected it to be his only interest, the first thing he would share with her. He did not mention it. He led her to talk, instead, about her job, her progress, and what she felt for Taggart Transcontinental. She spoke of it as she had always spoken to him, in the knowledge that he was the only one who could understand her passionate devotion. He made no comment, but he listened intently.  A waiter had turned on the radio for dinner music; they had paid no attention to it. But suddenly, a crash of sound jarred the room, almost as if a subterranean blast had struck the walls and made them tremble. The shock came, not from the loudness, but from the quality of the sounds. It was Halley's new Concerto, recently written, the Fourth.  They sat in silence, listening to the statement of rebellion-the anthem of the triumph of the great victims who would refuse to accept pain. Francisco listened, looking out at the city.  Without transition or warning, he asked, his voice oddly unstressed, "Dagny, what would you say if I asked you to leave Taggart Transcontinental and let it go to hell, as it will when your brother takes over?"  "What would I say if you asked me to consider the idea of committing suicide?" she answered angrily.  He remained silent.  "Why did you say that?" she snapped. "I didn't think you'd joke about it. It's not like you."  There was no touch of humor in his face. He answered quietly, gravely, "No. Of course. I shouldn't."  She brought herself to question him about his work. He answered the questions; he volunteered nothing. She repeated to him the comments of the industrialists about the brilliant prospects of d'Anconia Copper under his management. "That's true," he said, his voice lifeless.  In sudden anxiety, not knowing what prompted her, she asked, "Francisco, why did you come to New York?"  He answered slowly, "To see a friend who called for me,"  "Business?"  Looking past her, as if answering a thought of his own, a faint smile of bitter amusement on his face, but his voice strangely soft and sad, he answered: "Yes."  It was long past midnight when she awakened in bed by his side.  No sounds came from the city below. The stillness of the room made life seem suspended for a while. Relaxed in happiness and in complete exhaustion, she turned lazily to glance at him. He lay on his back, half propped by a pillow. She saw his profile against the foggy glow of the night sky in the window. He was awake, his eyes were open. He held his mouth closed like a man lying in resignation in unbearable pain, bearing it, making no attempt to hide it.  She was too frightened to move. He felt her glance and turned to her.  He shuddered suddenly, he threw off the blanket, he looked at her naked body, then he fell forward and buried his face between her breasts. He held her shoulders, hanging onto her convulsively. She heard the words, muffled, his mouth pressed to her skin: "I can't give it up! I can't!"  "What?" she whispered.  "You."  "Why should-"  "And everything."  "Why should you give it up?"  "Dagny! Help me to remain. To refuse. Even though he's right!"  She asked evenly, 'To refuse what, Francisco?"  He did not answer, only pressed his face harder against her.  She lay very still, conscious of nothing but a supreme need of caution.  His head on her breast, her hand caressing his hair gently, steadily, she lay looking up at the ceiling of the room, at the sculptured garlands faintly visible in the darkness, and she waited, numb with terror.  He moaned, "It's right, but it's so hard to do! Oh God, it's so hard!"  After a while, he raised his head. He sat up. He had stopped trembling.  "What is it, Francisco?"  "I can't tell you." His voice was simple, open, without attempt to disguise suffering, but it was a voice that obeyed him now. "You're not ready to hear it."  "I want to help you."  "You can't."  "You said, to help you refuse."  "I can't refuse."  "Then let me share it with you."  He shook his head.  He sat looking down at her, as if weighing a question. Then he shook his head again, in answer to himself.  "If I'm not sure I can stand it," he said, and the strange new note in his voice was tenderness, "how could you?"  She said slowly, with effort, trying to keep herself from screaming, "Francisco, I have to know."  "Will you forgive me? I know you're frightened, and it's cruel. But will you do this for me-will you let it go, just let it go, and don't ask me anything?"  "I_"  "That's all you can do for me. Will you?"  "Yes, Francisco."  "Don't be afraid for me. It was just this once. It won't happen to me again. It will become much easier . . . later."  "If I could-"  "No. Go to sleep, dearest,"  It was the first time he had ever used that word.  In the morning, he faced her openly, not avoiding her anxious glance, but saying nothing about it. She saw both serenity and suffering in the calm of his face, an expression like a smile of pain, though he was not smiling. Strangely, it made him look younger. He did not look like a man bearing torture now, but like a man who sees that which makes the torture worth bearing.  She did not question him. Before leaving, she asked only, "When will I see you again?"  He answered, "I don't know. Don't wait for me, Dagny. Next time we meet, you will not want to see me. I will have a reason for the things I'll do. But I can't tell you the reason and you will be right to damn me. I am not committing the contemptible act of asking you to take me on faith. You have to live by your own knowledge and judgment. You will damn me. You will be hurt. Try not to let it hurt you too much. Remember that I told you this and that it was all I could tell you."  She heard nothing from him or about him for a year. When she began to hear gossip and to read newspaper stories, she did not believe, at first, that they referred to Francisco d'Anconia. After a while, she had to believe it.  She read the story of the party he gave on his yacht, in the harbor of Valparaiso; the guests wore bathing suits, and an artificial rain of champagne and flower petals kept falling upon the decks throughout the night.  She read the story of the party he gave at an Algerian desert resort; he built a pavilion of thin sheets of ice and presented every woman guest with an ermine wrap, as a gift to be worn for the occasion, on condition that they remove their wraps, then their evening gowns, then all the rest, in tempo with the melting of the walls.  She read the accounts of the business ventures he undertook at lengthy intervals; the ventures were spectacularly successful and ruined his competitors, but he indulged in them as in an occasional sport, staging a sudden raid, then vanishing from the industrial scene for a year or two, leaving d'Anconia Copper to the management of his employees.  She read the interview where he said, "Why should I wish to make money? I have enough to permit three generations of descendants to have as good a time as I'm having."  She saw him once, at a reception given by an ambassador in New York. He bowed to her courteously, he smiled, and he looked at her with a glance in which no past existed. She drew him aside. She said only, "Francisco, why?" "Why-what?" he asked. She turned away. "I warned you," he said. She did not try to see him again.  She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it. She would not allow pain to become important. She had no name for the kind of resistance she offered, for the emotion from which the resistance came; but the words that stood as its equivalent in her mind were: It does not count -it is not to be taken seriously. She knew these were the words, even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness so that it would not tell her that what could not be true was true. Not to be taken seriously-an immovable certainty within her kept repeating-pain and ugliness are never to be taken seriously.  She fought it. She recovered. Years helped her to reach the day when she could face her memories indifferently, then the day when she felt no necessity to face them. It was finished and of no concern to her any longer.  There had been no other men in her life. She did not know whether this had made her unhappy. She had had no time to know. She found the clean, brilliant sense of life as she wanted it-in her work. Once, Francisco had given her the same sense, a feeling that belonged with her work and in her world. The men she had met since were like the men she met at her first ball.  She had won the battle against her memories. But one form of torture remained, untouched by the years, the torture of the word "why?"  Whatever the tragedy he met, why had Francisco taken the ugliest way of escape, as ignoble as the way of some cheap alcoholic? The boy she had known could not have become a useless coward. An incomparable mind could not turn its ingenuity to the invention of melting ballrooms. Yet he had and did, and there was no explanation to make it conceivable and to let her forget him in peace. She could not doubt the fact of what he had been; she could not doubt the fact of what he had become; yet one made the other impossible. At times, she almost doubted her own rationality or the existence of any rationality anywhere; but this was a doubt which she did not permit to anyone. Yet there was no explanation, no reason, no clue to any conceivable reason -and in all the days of ten years she had found no hint of an answer.  No, she thought-as she walked through the gray twilight, past the windows of abandoned shops, to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel-no, there could be no answer. She would not seek it. It did not matter now.  The remnant of violence, the emotion rising as a thin trembling within her, was not for the man she was going to see; it was a cry of protest against a sacrilege-against the destruction of what had been greatness.  In a break between buildings, she saw the towers of the Wayne Falkland. She felt a slight jolt, in her lungs and legs, that stopped her for an instant. Then she walked on evenly.  By the time she walked through the marble lobby, to the elevator, then down the wide, velvet-carpeted, soundless corridors of the Wayne Falkland, she felt nothing but a cold anger that grew colder with every step.  She was certain of the anger when she knocked at his door. She heard his voice, answering, "Come in." She jerked the door open and entered.  Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia sat on the floor, playing marbles.  Nobody ever wondered whether Francisco d'Anconia was good-looking or not; it seemed irrelevant; when he entered a room, it was impossible to look at anyone else. His tall, slender figure had an air of distinction, too authentic to be modern, and he moved as if he had a cape floating behind him in the wind. People explained him by saying that he had the vitality of a healthy animal, but they knew dimly that that was not correct. He had the vitality of a healthy human being, a thing so rare that no one could identify it. He had the power of certainty.  Nobody described his appearance as Latin, yet the word applied to him, not in its present, but in its original sense, not pertaining to Spain, but to ancient Rome. His body seemed designed as an exercise in consistency of style, a style made of gauntness, of tight flesh, long legs and swift movements. His features had the fine precision of sculpture. His hair was black and straight, swept back. The suntan of his skin intensified the startling color of his eyes: they were a pure, clear blue. His face was open, its rapid changes of expression reflecting whatever he felt, as if he had nothing to hide. The blue eyes were still and changeless, never giving a hint of what he thought.  He sat on the floor of his drawing room, dressed in sleeping pajamas of thin black silk. The marbles spread on the carpet around him were made of the semi-precious stones of his native country: carnelian and rock crystal. He did not rise when Dagny entered. He sat looking up at her, and a crystal marble fell like a teardrop out of his hand. He smiled, the unchanged, insolent, brilliant smile of his childhood.  "Hi, Slug!"  She heard herself answering, irresistibly, helplessly, happily: "Hi, Frisco!"  She was looking at his face; it was the face she had known. It bore no mark of the kind of life he had led, nor of what she had seen on their last night together. There was no sign of tragedy, no bitterness, no tension-only the radiant mockery, matured and stressed, the look of dangerously unpredictable amusement, and the great, guiltless serenity of spirit. But this, she thought, was impossible; this was more shocking than all the rest.  His eyes were studying her: the battered coat thrown open, half slipping off her shoulders, and the slender body in a gray suit that looked like an office uniform.  "If you came here dressed like this in order not to let me notice how lovely you are," he said, "you miscalculated. You're lovely. I wish I could tell you what a relief it is to see a face that's intelligent though a woman's. But you don't want to hear it. That's not what you came here for."  The words were improper in so many ways, yet were said so lightly that they brought her back to reality, to anger and to the purpose of her visit. She remained standing, looking down at him, her face blank, refusing him any recognition of the personal, even of its power to offend her. She said, "I came here to ask you a question."  "Go ahead."  "When you told those reporters that you came to New York to witness the farce, which farce did you mean?"  He laughed aloud, like a man who seldom finds a chance to enjoy the unexpected.  "That's what I like about you, Dagny. There are seven million people in the city of New York, at present. Out of seven million people, you are the only one to whom it could have occurred that I wasn't talking about the Vail divorce scandal."  "What were you talking about?"  "What alternative occurred to you?"  "The San Sebastian disaster."  "That's much more amusing than the Vail divorce scandal, isn't it?"  She said in the solemn, merciless tone of a prosecutor, "You did it consciously, cold-bloodedly and with full intention."  "Don't you think it would be better if you took your coat off and sat down?"  She knew she had made a mistake by betraying too much intensity.  She turned coldly, removed her coat and threw it aside. He did not rise to help her. She sat down in an armchair. He remained on the floor, at some distance, but it seemed as if he were sitting at her feet.  "What was it I did with full intention?" he asked.  "The entire San Sebastian swindle."  "What was my full intention?"  "That is what I want to know."  He chuckled, as if she had asked him to explain in conversation a complex science requiring a lifetime of study.  "You knew that the San Sebastian mines were worthless," she said. "You knew it before you began the whole wretched business."  "Then why did I begin it?"  "Don't start telling me that you gained nothing. I know it. I know you lost fifteen million dollars of your own money. Yet it was done on purpose."  "Can you think of a motive that would prompt me to do it?"  "No. It's inconceivable."  "Is it? You assume that I have a great mind, a great knowledge and a great productive ability, so that anything I undertake must necessarily be successful. And then you claim that I had no desire to put out my best effort for the People's State of Mexico. Inconceivable, isn't it?"  "You knew, before you bought that property, that Mexico was in the hands of a looters' government. You didn't have to start a mining project for them."  "No, I didn't have to."  "You didn't give a damn about that Mexican government, one way or another, because-"  "You're wrong about that."  "-because you knew they'd seize those mines sooner or later. What you were after is your American stockholders."  "That's true." He was looking straight at her, he was not smiling, his face was earnest. He added, "That's part of the truth."  "What's the rest?"  "It was not all I was after."  "What else?"  "That's for you to figure out."  "I came here because I wanted you to know that I am beginning to understand your purpose."  He smiled. "If you did, you wouldn't have come here."  "That's true. I don't understand and probably never shall. I am merely beginning to see part of it."  "Which part?"  "You had exhausted every other form of depravity and sought a new thrill by swindling people like Jim and his friends, in order to watch them squirm. I don't know what sort of corruption could make anyone enjoy that, but that's what you came to New York to see, at the right time."  "They certainly provided a spectacle of squirming on the grand scale. Your brother James in particular."  "They're rotten fools, but in this case their only crime was that they trusted you. They trusted your name and your honor."  Again, she saw the look of earnestness and again knew with certainty that it was genuine, when he said, "Yes. They did. I know it."  "And do you find it amusing?"  "No. I don't find it amusing at all."  He had continued playing with his marbles, absently, indifferently, taking a shot once in a while. She noticed suddenly the faultless accuracy of his aim, the skill of his hands. He merely flicked his wrist and sent a drop of stone shooting across the carpet to click sharply against another drop. She thought of his childhood and of the predictions that anything he did would be done superlatively.  "No," he said, "I don't find it amusing. Your brother James and his friends knew nothing about the copper-mining industry. They knew nothing about making money. They did not think it necessary to learn. They considered knowledge superfluous and judgment inessential. They observed that there I was in the world and that I made it my honor to know. They thought they could trust my honor. One does not betray a trust of this kind, does one?"  "Then you did betray it intentionally?"  "That's for you to decide. It was you who spoke about their trust and my honor. I don't think in such terms any longer. . . ." He shrugged, adding, "I don't give a damn about your brother James and his friends. Their theory was not new, it has worked for centuries. But it wasn't foolproof. There is just one point that they overlooked. They thought it was safe to ride on my brain, because they assumed that the goal of my journey was wealth. All their calculations rested on the premise that I wanted to make money. What if I didn't?"  "If you didn't, what did you want?"  "They never asked me that. Not to inquire about my aims, motives or desires is an essential part of their theory."  "If you didn't want to make money, what possible motive could you have had?"  "Any number of them. For instance, to spend it."  "To spend money on a certain, total failure?"  "How was I to know that those mines were a certain, total failure?"  "How could you help knowing it?"  "Quite simply. By giving it no thought."  "You started that project without giving it any thought?"  "No, not exactly. But suppose I slipped up? I'm only human. I made a mistake. I failed. I made a bad job of it." He flicked his wrist; a crystal marble shot, sparkling, across the floor and cracked violently against a brown one at the other end of the room.  "I don't believe it," she said.  "No? But haven't I the right to be what is now accepted as human? Should I pay for everybody's mistakes and never be permitted one of my own?"  "That's not like you."  "No?" He stretched himself full-length on the carpet, lazily, relaxing.  "Did you intend me to notice that if you think I did it on purpose, then you still give me credit for having a purpose? You're still unable to accept me as a bum?"  She closed her eyes. She heard him laughing; it was the gayest sound hi the world. She opened her eyes hastily; but there was no hint of cruelty in his face, only pure laughter.  "My motive, Dagny? You don't think that it's the simplest one of all-the spur of the moment?"  No, she thought, no, that's not true; not if he laughed like that, not if he looked as he did. The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.  Almost dispassionately, looking at his figure stretched on the carpet at her feet, she observed what memory it brought back to her: the black pajamas stressed the long lines of his body, the open collar showed a smooth, young, sunburned skin-and she thought of the figure in black slacks and shirt stretched beside her on the grass at sunrise. She had felt pride then, the pride of knowing that she owned his body; she still felt it. She remembered suddenly, specifically, the excessive acts of their intimacy; the memory should have been offensive to her now, but wasn't. It was still pride, without regret or hope, an emotion that had no power to reach her and that she had no power to destroy.  Unaccountably, by an association of feeling that astonished her, she remembered what had conveyed to her recently the same sense of consummate joy as his.  "Francisco," she heard herself saying softly, "we both loved the music of Richard Halley. . . ."  "I still love it."  "Have you ever met him?"  "Yes. Why?"  "Do you happen to know whether he has written a Fifth Concerto?"  He remained perfectly still. She had thought him impervious to shock; he wasn't. But she could not attempt to guess why of all the things she had said, this should be the first to reach him. It was only an instant; then he asked evenly, "What makes you think he has?"  "Well, has he?"  "You know that there are only four Halley Concertos."  "Yes. But I wondered whether he had written another one."  "He has stopped writing."  "I know."  "Then what made you ask that?"  "Just an idle thought. What is he doing now? Where is he?"  "I don't know. I haven't seen him for a long time. What made you think that there was a Fifth Concerto?"  "I didn't say there was. I merely wondered about it."  "Why did you think of Richard Halley just now?"  "Because"-she felt her control cracking a little-"because my mind can't make the leap from Richard Halley's music to . . . to Mrs. Gilbert Vail."  He laughed, relieved. "Oh, that? . . . Incidentally, if you've been following my publicity, have you noticed a funny little discrepancy in the story of Mrs. Gilbert Vail?"  "I don't read the stuff."  "You should. She gave such a beautiful description of last New Year's Eve, which we spent together in my villa in the Andes. The moonlight on the mountain peaks, and the blood-red flowers hanging on vines in the open windows. See anything wrong in the picture?"  She said quietly, "It's I who should ask you that, and I'm not going to."  "Oh, I see nothing wrong-except that last New Year's Eve I was in El Paso, Texas, presiding at the opening of the San Sebastian Line of Taggart Transcontinental, as you should remember, even if you didn't choose to be present on the occasion. I had my picture taken with my arms around your brother James and the Senor Orren Boyle."  She gasped, remembering that this was true, remembering also that she had seen Mrs. Vail's story in the newspapers.  "Francisco, what . . . what does that mean?"  He chuckled. "Draw your own conclusions. . . . Dagny"-his face was serious-"why did you think of Halley writing a Fifth Concerto? Why not a new symphony or opera? Why specifically a concerto?"  "Why does that disturb you?"  "It doesn't." He added softly, "I still love his music, Dagny." Then he spoke lightly again. "But it belonged to another age. Our age provides a different kind of entertainment."  He rolled over on his back and lay with his hands crossed under his head, looking up as if he were watching the scenes of a movie farce unrolling on the ceiling.  "Dagny, didn't you enjoy the spectacle of the behavior of the People's State of Mexico in regard to the San Sebastian Mines? Did you read their government's speeches and the editorials in their newspapers?  They're saying that I am an unscrupulous cheat who has defrauded them. They expected to have a successful mining concern to seize. I had no right to disappoint them like that. Did you read about the scabby little bureaucrat who wanted them to sue me?"  He laughed, lying flat on his back; his arms were thrown wide on the carpet, forming a cross with his body; he seemed disarmed, relaxed and young.  "It was worth whatever it's cost me. I could afford the price of that show. If I had staged it intentionally, I would have beaten the record of the Emperor Nero. What's burning a city-compared to tearing the lid off hell and letting men see it?"  He raised himself, picked up a few marbles and sat shaking them absently in his hand; they clicked with the soft, clear sound of good stone. She realized suddenly that playing with those marbles was not a deliberate affectation on his part; it was restlessness; he could not remain inactive for long.  "The government of the People's State of Mexico has issued a proclamation," he said, "asking the people to be patient and put up with hardships just a little longer. It seems that the copper fortune of the San Sebastian Mines was part of the plans of the central planning council.  It was to raise everybody's standard of living and provide a roast of pork every Sunday for every man, woman, child and abortion in the People's State of Mexico. Now the planners are asking their people not to blame the government, but to blame the depravity of the rich, because I turned out to be an irresponsible playboy, instead of the greedy capitalist I was expected to be. How were they to know, they're asking, that I would let them down? Well, true enough. How were they to know it?"  She noticed the way he fingered the marbles in his hand. He was not conscious of it, he was looking off into some grim distance, but she felt certain that the action was a relief to him, perhaps as a contrast. His fingers were moving slowly, feeling the texture of the stones with sensual enjoyment. Instead of finding it crude, she found it strangely attractive- as if, she thought suddenly, as if sensuality were not physical at all, but came from a fine discrimination of the spirit.  "And that's not all they didn't know," he said. "They're in for some more knowledge. There's that housing settlement for the workers of San Sebastian. It cost eight million dollars. Steel-frame houses, with plumbing, electricity and refrigeration. Also a school, a church, a hospital and a movie theater. A settlement built for people who had lived in hovels made of driftwood and stray tin cans. My reward for building it was to be the privilege of escaping with my skin, a special concession due to the accident of my not being a native of the People's State of Mexico. That workers' settlement was also part of their plans.  A model example of progressive State housing. Well, those steel-frame houses arc mainly cardboard, with a coating of good imitation shellac, They won't stand another year. The plumbing pipes-as well as most of our mining equipment-were purchased from the dealers whose main source of supply are the city dumps of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. I'd give those pipes another five months, and the electric system about six. The wonderful roads we graded up four thousand feet of rock for the People's State of Mexico, will not last beyond a couple of winters: they're cheap cement without foundation, and the bracing at the bad turns is just painted clapboard. Wait for one good mountain slide. The church, I think, will stand. They'll need it."  "Francisco," she whispered, "did you do it on purpose?"  He raised his head; she was startled to see that his face had a look of infinite weariness. "Whether I did it on purpose," he said, "or through neglect, or through stupidity, don't you understand that that doesn't make any difference? The same element was missing."  She was trembling. Against all her decisions and control, she cried, "Francisco! If you see what's happening in the world, if you understand all the things you said, you can't laugh about it! You, of all men, you should fight them!"  "Whom?"  "The looters, and those who make world-looting possible. The Mexican planners and their kind."  His smile had a dangerous edge. "No, my dear. It's you that I have to fight."  She looked at him blankly. "What are you trying to say?"  "I am saying that the workers' settlement of San Sebastian cost eight million dollars," he answered with slow emphasis, his voice hard. "The price paid for those cardboard houses was the price that could have bought steel structures. So was the price paid for every other item. That money went to men who grow rich by such methods. Such men do not remain rich for long. The money will go into channels which will carry it, not to the most productive, but to the most corrupt. By the standards of our time, the man who has the least to offer is the man who wins. That money will vanish in projects such as the San Sebastian Mines,"  She asked with effort, "Is that what you're after?"  "Yes."  "Is that what you find amusing?"  "Yes."  "I am thinking of your name," she said, while another part of her mind was crying to her that reproaches were useless. "It was a tradition of your family that a d'Anconia always left a fortune greater than the one he received."  "Oh yes, my ancestors had a remarkable ability for doing the right thing at the right time-and for making the right investments. Of course, 'investment' is a relative term. It depends on what you wish to accomplish. For instance, look at San Sebastian. It cost me fifteen million dollars, but these fifteen million wiped out forty million belonging to Taggart Transcontinental, thirty-five million belonging to stockholders such as James Taggart and Orren Boyle, and hundreds of millions which will be lost in secondary consequences. That's not a bad return on an investment, is it, Dagny?"  She was sitting straight. "Do you realize what you're saying?"  "Oh, fully! Shall I beat you to it and name the consequences you were going to reproach me for? First, I don't think that Taggart Transcontinental will recover from its loss on that preposterous San Sebastian Line. You think it will, but it won't. Second, the San Sebastian helped your brother James to destroy the Phoenix-Durango, which was about the only good railroad left anywhere."  "You realize all that?"  "And a great deal more."  "Do you"-she did not know why she had to say it, except that the memory of the face with the dark, violent eyes seemed to stare at her- "do you know Ellis Wyatt?"  "Sure."  "Do you know what this might do to him?"  "Yes. He's the one who's going to be wiped out next."  "Do you . . . find that . . . amusing?"  "Much more amusing than the ruin of the Mexican planners."  She stood up. She had called him corrupt for years; she had feared it, she had thought about it, she had tried to forget it and never think of it again; but she had never suspected how far the corruption had gone.  She was not looking at him; she did not know that she was saying it aloud, quoting his words of the past: ". . . who'll do greater honor, you-to Nat Taggart, or I-to Sebastian d'Anconia . . ."  "But didn't you realize that I named those mines in honor of my great ancestor? I think it was a tribute which he would have liked."  It took her a moment to recover her eyesight; she had never known what was meant by blasphemy or what one felt on encountering it; she knew it now.  He had risen and stood courteously, smiling down at her; it was a cold smile, impersonal and unrevealing.  She was trembling, but it did not matter. She did not care what he saw or guessed or laughed at.  "I came here because I wanted to know the reason for what you've done with your life," she said tonelessly, without anger.  "I have told you the reason," he answered gravely, "but you don't want to believe it."  "I kept seeing you as you were. I couldn't forget it. And that you should have become what you are-that does not belong in a rational universe."  "No? And the world as you see it around you, does?"  "You were not the kind of man who gets broken by any kind of world"  "True."  "Then-why?"  He shrugged. "Who is John Galt?"  "Oh, don't use gutter language!"  He glanced at her. His lips held the hint of a smile, but his eyes were still, earnest and, for an instant, disturbingly perceptive.  "Why?" she repeated.  He answered, as he had answered in the night, in this hotel, ten years ago, "You're not ready to hear it."  He did not follow her to the door. She had put her hand on the doorknob when she turned-and stopped. He stood across the room, looking at her; it was a glance directed at her whole person; she knew its meaning and it held her motionless, "I still want to sleep with you," he said. "But I am not a man who is happy enough to do it."  "Not happy enough?" she repeated in complete bewilderment.  He laughed. "Is it proper that that should be the first thing you'd answer?" He waited, but she remained silent. "You want it, too, don't you?"  She was about to answer "No," but realized that the truth was worse than that. "Yes," she answered coldly, "but it doesn't matter to me that I want it."  He smiled, in open appreciation, acknowledging the strength she had needed to say it.  But he was not smiling when he said, as she opened the door to leave, "You have a great deal of courage, Dagny. Some day, you'll have enough of it."  "Of what? Courage?"  But he did not answer.