CHAPTER II THE ARISTOCRACY OF PULL

The calendar in the sky beyond the window of her office said: September 2. Dagny leaned wearily across her desk. The first light to snap on at the approach of dusk was always the ray that hit the calendar; when the white-glowing page appeared above the roofs, it blurred the city, hastening the darkness.  She had looked at that distant page every evening of the months behind her. Your days are numbered, it had seemed to say-as if it were marking a progression toward something it knew, but she didn't. Once, it had clocked her race to build the John Galt Line; now it was clocking her race against an unknown destroyer.  One by one, the men who had built new towns in Colorado, had departed into some silent unknown, from which no voice or person had yet returned. The towns they had left were dying. Some of the factories they built had remained ownerless and locked; others had been seized by the local authorities; the machines in both stood still.  She had felt as if a dark map of Colorado were spread before her like a traffic control panel, with a few lights scattered through its mountains. One after another, the lights had gone out. One after another, the men had vanished. There had been a pattern about it, which she felt, but could not define; she had become able to predict, almost with certainty, who would go next and when; she was unable to grasp the "why?"  Of the men who had once greeted her descent from the cab of an engine on the platform of Wyatt Junction, only Ted Nielsen was left, still running the plant of Nielsen Motors. "Ted, you won't be the next one to go?" she had asked him, on his recent visit to New York; she had asked it, trying to smile. He had answered grimly, "I hope not."  "What do you mean, you hope?-aren't you sure?" He had said slowly, heavily, "Dagny, I've always thought that I'd rather die than stop working. But so did the men who're gone. It seems impossible to me that I could ever want to quit. But a year ago, it seemed impossible that they ever could. Those men were my friends. They knew what their going would do to us, the survivors. They would not have gone like that, without a word, leaving to us the added terror of the inexplicable-unless they had some reason of supreme importance. A month ago, Roger Marsh, of Marsh Electric, told me that he'd have himself chained to his desk, so that he wouldn't be able to leave it, no matter what ghastly temptation struck him. He was furious with anger at the men who'd left. He swore to me that he'd never do it. 'And if it's something that I can't resist,' he said, 'I swear that I'll keep enough of my mind to leave you a letter and give you some hint of what it is, so that you won't have to rack your brain in the kind of dread we're both feeling now.' That's what he swore. Two weeks ago, he went. He left me no letter. . . . Dagny, I can't tell what I'll do when I see it-whatever it was that they saw when they went."  It seemed to her that some destroyer was moving soundlessly through the country and the lights were dying at his touch-someone, she thought bitterly, who had reversed the principle of the Twentieth Century motor and was now turning kinetic energy into static.  That was the enemy-she thought, as she sat at her desk in the gathering twilight-with whom she was running a race. The monthly report from Quentin Daniels lay on her desk. She could not be certain, as yet, that Daniels would solve the secret of the motor; but the destroyer, she thought, was moving swiftly, surely, at an ever accelerating tempo; she wondered whether, by the time she rebuilt the motor, there would be any world left to use it.  She had liked Quentin Daniels from the moment he entered her office on their first interview. He was a lanky man in his early thirties, with a homely, angular face and an attractive smile. A hint of the smile remained in his features at all times, particularly when he listened; it was a look of good-natured amusement, as if he were swiftly and patiently discarding the irrelevant in the words he heard and going straight to the point a moment ahead of the speaker.  "Why did you refuse to work for Dr. Stadler?" she asked.  The hint of his smile grew harder and more stressed; this was as near as he came to showing an emotion; the emotion was anger. But he answered in his even, unhurried drawl, "You know, Dr. Stadler once said that the first word of 'Free, scientific inquiry' was redundant. He seems to have forgotten it. Well, I'll just say that 'Governmental scientific inquiry' is a contradiction in terms."  She asked him what position he held at the Utah Institute of Technology. "Night watchman," he answered. "What?" she gasped. "Night watchman," he repeated politely, as if she had not caught the words, as if there were no cause for astonishment.  Under her questioning, he explained that he did not like any of the scientific foundations left in existence, that he would have liked a job in the research laboratory of some big industrial concern-"But which one of them can afford to undertake any long-range work nowadays, and why should they?"-so when the Utah Institute of Technology was closed for lack of funds, he had remained there as night watchman and sole inhabitant of the place; the salary was sufficient to pay for his needs-and the Institute's laboratory was there, intact, for his own private, undisturbed use.  "So you're doing research work of your own?"  "That's right."  "For what purpose?"  "For my own pleasure."  "What do you intend to do, if you discover something of scientific importance or commercial value? Do you intend to put it to some public use?"  "I don't know. I don't think so."  "Haven't you any desire to be of service to humanity?"  "I don't talk that kind of language, Miss Taggart. I don't think you do, either."  She laughed. "I think we'll get along together, you and I."  "We will."  When she had told him the story of the motor, when he had studied the manuscript, he made no comment, but merely said that he would take the job on any terms she named.  She asked him to choose his own terms. She protested, in astonishment, against the low monthly salary he quoted. "Miss Taggart," he said, "if there's something that I won't take, it's something for nothing. I don't know how long you might have to pay me, or whether you'll get anything at all in return. I'll gamble on my own mind. I won't let anybody else do it. I don't collect for an intention. But I sure do intend to collect for goods delivered. If I succeed, that's when I'll skin you alive, because what I want then is a percentage, and it's going to be high, but it's going to be worth your while."  When he named the percentage he wanted, she laughed. "That is skinning me alive and it will be worth my while. Okay."  They agreed that it was to be her private project and that he was to be her private employee; neither of them wanted to have to deal with the interference of the Taggart Research Department. He asked to remain in Utah, in his post of watchman, where he had all the laboratory equipment and all the privacy he needed. The project was to remain confidential between them, until and unless he succeeded.  "Miss Taggart," he said in conclusion, "I don't know how many years it will take me to solve this, if ever. But I know that if I spend the rest of my life on it and succeed, I will die satisfied." He added, "There's only one thing that I want more than to solve it: it's to meet the man who has."  Once a month, since his return to Utah, she had sent him a check and he had sent her a report on his work. It was too early to hope, but his reports were the only bright points in the stagnant fog of her days in the office.  She raised her head, as she finished reading his pages. The calendar in the distance said: September 2. The lights of the city had grown beneath it, spreading and glittering. She thought of Rearden. She wished he were in the city; she wished she would sec him tonight.  Then, noticing the date, she remembered suddenly that she had to rush home to dress, because she had to attend Jim's wedding tonight.  She had not seen Jim, outside the office, for over a year. She had not met his fiancee, but she had read enough about the engagement in the newspapers. She rose from her desk in wearily distasteful resignation: it seemed easier to attend the wedding than to bother explaining her absence afterwards.  She was hurrying across the concourse of the Terminal when she heard a voice calling, "Miss Taggart!" with a strange note of urgency and reluctance, together. It stopped her abruptly; she took a few seconds to realize that it was the old man at the cigar stand who had called.  "I've been waiting to catch sight of you for days. Miss Taggart. I've been extremely anxious to speak to you." There was an odd expression on his face, the look of an effort not to look frightened.  "I'm sorry," she said, smiling, "I've been rushing in and out of the building all week and didn't have time to stop."  He did not smile. "Miss Taggart, that cigarette with the dollar sign that you gave me some months ago-where did you get it?"  She stood still for a moment. "I'm afraid that's a long, complicated story," she answered.  "Have you any way of getting in touch with the person who gave it to you?"  "I suppose so-though I'm not too sure. Why?"  "Would he tell you where he got it?"  "I don't know. What makes you suspect that he wouldn't?"  He hesitated, then asked, "Miss Taggart, what do you do when you have to tell someone something which you know to be impossible?"  She chuckled. 'The man who gave me the cigarette said that in such a case one must check one's premises."  "He did? About the cigarette?"  "Well, no, not exactly. But why? What is it you have to tell me?"  "Miss Taggart, I have inquired all over the world. I have checked every source of information in and about the tobacco industry. I have had that cigarette stub put through a chemical analysis. There is no plant that manufactures that kind of paper. The flavoring elements in that tobacco have never been used in any smoking mixture I could find. That cigarette was machine-made, but it was not made in any factory I know-and I know them all. Miss Taggart, to the best of my knowledge, that cigarette was not made anywhere on earth."  Rearden stood by, watching absently, while the waiter wheeled the dinner table out of his hotel room. Ken Danagger had left. The room was half-dark; by an unspoken agreement, they had kept the lights low during their dinner, so that Danagger's face would not be noticed and, perhaps, recognized by the waiters.  They had had to meet furtively, like criminals who could not be seen together. They could not meet in their offices or in their homes, only in the crowded anonymity of a city, in his suite at the Wayne Falkland Hotel. There could be a fine of $10,000 and ten years of imprisonment for each of them, if it became known that he had agreed to deliver to Danagger four thousand tons of structural shapes of Rearden Metal.  They had not discussed that law, at their dinner together, or their motives or the risk they were taking. They had merely talked business.  Speaking clearly and dryly, as he always spoke at any conference, Danagger had explained that half of his original order would be sufficient to brace such tunnels as would cave in, if he delayed the bracing much longer, and to recondition the mines of the Confederated Coal Company, gone bankrupt, which he had purchased three weeks ago-  "It's an excellent property, bat in rotten condition; they had a nasty accident there last month, cave-in and gas explosion, forty men killed."  He had added, in the monotone of reciting some impersonal, statistical report, "The newspapers are yelling that coal is now the most crucial commodity in the country. They are also yelling that the coal operators are profiteering on the oil shortage. One gang in Washington is yelling that I am expanding too much and something should be done to stop me, because I am becoming a monopoly. Another gang in Washington is yelling that I am not expanding enough and something should be done to let the government seize my mines, because I am greedy for profits and unwilling to satisfy the public's need of fuel. At my present rate of profit, this Confederated Coal property will bring back the money I spent on it-in forty-seven years. I have no children. I bought it, because there's one customer I don't dare leave without coal -and that's Taggart Transcontinental. I keep thinking of what would happen if the railroads collapsed." He had stopped, then added, "I don't know why I still care about that, but I do. Those people in Washington don't seem to have a clear picture of what that would be like. I have." Rearden had said, "I'll deliver the Metal. When you need the other half of your order, let me know. I'll deliver that, too."  At the end of the dinner, Danagger had said in the same precise, impassive tone, the tone of a man who knows the exact meaning of his words, "If any employee of yours or mine discovers this and attempts private blackmail, I will pay it, within reason. But I will not pay, if he has friends in Washington. If any of those come around, then I go to jail." "Then we go together," Rearden had said.  Standing alone in his half-darkened room, Rearden noted that the prospect of going to jail left him blankly indifferent. He remembered the time when, aged fourteen, faint with hunger, he would not steal fruit from a sidewalk stand. Now, the possibility of being sent to jail-this dinner was a felony-meant no more to him than the possibility of being run over by a truck: an ugly physical accident without any moral significance.  He thought that he had been made to hide, as a guilty secret, the only business transaction he had enjoyed in a year's work-and that he was hiding, as a guilty secret, his nights with Dagny, the only hours that kept him alive. He felt that there was some connection between the two secrets, some essential connection which he had to discover. He could not grasp it, he could not find the words to name it, but he felt that the day when he would find them, he would answer every question of his life.  He stood against the wall, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, and thought of Dagny, and then he felt that no questions could matter to him any longer. He thought that he would see her tonight, almost hating it, because tomorrow morning seemed so close and then he would have to leave her-he wondered whether he could remain in town tomorrow, or whether he should leave now, without seeing her, so that he could wait, so that he could always have it ahead of him: the moment of closing his hands over her shoulders and looking down at her face. You're going insane, he thought-but he knew that if she were beside him through every hour of his days, it would still be the same, he would never have enough of it, he would have to invent some senseless form of torture for himself in order to bear it-he knew he would see her tonight, and the thought of leaving without it made the pleasure greater, a moment's torture to underscore his certainty of the hours ahead. He would leave the light on in her living room, he thought, and hold her across the bed, and see nothing but the curve of the strip of light running from her waist to her ankle, a single line drawing the whole shape of her long, slim body in the darkness, then he would pull her head into the light, to see her face, to see it falling back, unresisting, her hair over his arm. her eyes closed, the face drawn as in a look of pain, her mouth open to him.  He stood at the wall, waiting, to let all the events of the day drop away from him, to feel free, to know that the next span of time was his.  When the door of his room flew open without warning, he did not quite hear or believe it, at first. He saw the silhouette of a woman, then of a bellboy who put down a suitcase and vanished. The voice he heard was Lillian's: "Why, Henry! All alone and in the dark?"  She pressed a light switch by the door. She stood there, fastidiously groomed, wearing a pale beige traveling suit that looked as if she had traveled under glass; she was smiling and pulling her gloves off with the air of having reached home.  "Are you in for the evening, dear?" she asked. "Or were you going out?"  He did not know how long a time passed before he answered, "What are you doing here?"  "Why, don't you remember that Jim Taggart invited us to his wedding? It's tonight."  "I didn't intend to go to his wedding."  "Oh, but I did!"  "Why didn't you tell me this morning, before I left?"  "To surprise you, darling." She laughed gaily. "It's practically impossible to drag you to any social function, but I thought you might do it like this, on the spur of the moment, just to go out and have a good time, as married couples are supposed to. I thought you wouldn't mind it-you've been staying overnight in New York so often!"  He saw the casual glance thrown at him from under the brim of her fashionably tilted hat. He said nothing.  "Of course, I was running a risk," she said. "You might have been taking somebody out to dinner." He said nothing. "Or were you, perhaps, intending to return home tonight?"  "No."  "Did you have an engagement for this evening?"  "No."  "Fine." She pointed at her suitcase. "I brought my evening clothes. Will you bet me a corsage of orchids that I can get dressed faster than you can?"  He thought that Dagny would be at her brother's wedding tonight; the evening did not matter to him any longer. "I'll take you out, if you wish," he said, "but not to that wedding."  "Oh, but that's where I want to go! It's the most preposterous event of the season, and everybody's been looking forward to it for weeks, all my friends. I wouldn't miss it for the world. There isn't any better show in town-nor better publicized. It's a perfectly ridiculous marriage, but just about what you'd expect from Jim Taggart."  She was moving casually through the room, glancing around, as if getting acquainted with an unfamiliar place. "I haven't been in New York for years," she said. "Not with you, that is. Not on any formal occasion."  He noticed the pause in the aimless wandering of her eyes, a glance that stopped briefly on a filled ashtray and moved on. He felt a stab of revulsion.  She saw it in his face and laughed gaily. "Oh but, darling, I'm not relieved! I'm disappointed. I did hope I'd find a few cigarette butts smeared with lipstick."  He gave her credit for the admission of the spying, even if under cover of a joke. But something in the stressed frankness of her manner made him wonder whether she was joking; for the flash of an instant, he felt that she had told him the truth. He dismissed the impression, because he could not conceive of it as possible.  "I'm afraid that you'll never be human," she said. "So I'm sure that I have no rival. And if I have-which I doubt, darling-I don't think I'll worry about it, because if it's a person who's always available on call, without appointment-well, everybody knows what sort of a person that is."  He thought that he would have to be careful; he had been about to slap her face. "Lillian, I think you know," he said, "that humor of this kind is more than I can stand."  "Oh, you're so serious!" she laughed. "I keep forgetting it. You're so serious about everything-particularly yourself."  Then she whirled to him suddenly, her smile gone. She had the strange, pleading look which he had seen in her face at times, a look that seemed made of sincerity and courage: "You prefer to be serious, Henry? All right. How long do you wish me to exist somewhere in the basement of your life? How lonely do you want me to become? I've asked nothing of you. I've let you live your life as you pleased. Can't you give me one evening? Oh, I know you hate parties and you'll be bored. But it means a great deal to me. Call it empty, social vanity-I want to appear, for once, with my husband. I suppose you never think of it in such terms, but you're an important man, you're envied, hated, respected and feared, you're a man whom any woman would be proud to show off as her husband.  “You may say it's a low form of feminine ostentation, but that's the form of any woman's happiness. You don't live by such standards, but I do. Can't you give me this much, at the price of a few hours of boredom? Can't you be strong enough to fulfill your obligation and to perform a husband's duty? Can't you go there, not for your own sake, but mine, not because you want to go, but only because I want it?"  Dagny-he thought desperately-Dagny, who had never said a word about his life at home, who had never made a claim, uttered a reproach or asked a question-he could not appear before her with his  wife, he could not let her see him as the husband being proudly shown off-he wished he could die now, in this moment, before he committed this action-because he knew that he would commit it.  Because he had accepted his secret as guilt and promised himself to take its consequences-because he had granted that the right was with Lillian, and he was able to bear any form of damnation, but not able to deny the right when it was claimed of him-because he knew that the reason for his refusal to go, was the reason that gave him no right to refuse-because he heard the pleading cry in his mind: "Oh God, Lillian, anything but that party!" and he did not allow himself to beg for mercy--he said evenly, his voice lifeless and firm: "All right, Lillian. I'll go."  The wedding veil of rose-point lace caught on the splintered floor of her tenement bedroom. Cherryl Brooks lifted it cautiously, stepping to look at herself in a crooked mirror that hung on the wall. She had been photographed here all day, as she had been many times in the past two months. She still smiled with incredulous gratitude when newspaper people wanted to take her picture, but she wished they would not do it so often.  An aging sob sister, who had a drippy love column in print and the bitter wisdom of a policewoman in person, had taken Cherryl under her protection weeks ago, when the girl had first been thrown into press interviews as into a meat grinder. Today, the sob sister had chased the reporters out, had snapped, "All right, all right, beat it!" at the neighbors, had slammed Cherryl's door in their faces and had helped her to dress. She was to drive Cherryl to the wedding; she had discovered that there was no one else to do it.  The wedding veil, the white satin gown, the delicate slippers and the strand of pearls at her throat, had cost five hundred times the price of the entire contents of Cherryl's room. A bed took most of the room's space, and the rest was taken by a chest of drawers, one chair, and her few dresses hanging behind a faded curtain. The huge hoop skirt of the wedding gown brushed against the walls when she moved, her slender figure swaying above the skirt in the dramatic contrast of a tight, severe, long-sleeved bodice; the gown had been made by the best designer in the city.  "You see, when I got the job in the dime store, I could have moved to a better room," she said to the sob sister, in apology, "but I don't think it matters much where you sleep at night, so I saved my money, because I'll need it for something important in the future-"  She stopped and smiled, shaking her head dazedly. "I thought I'd need it," she said.  "You look fine," said the sob sister. "You can't see much in that alleged mirror, but you're okay."  "The way all this happened, I . . . I haven't had time to catch up with myself. But you see, Jim is wonderful. He doesn't mind it, that I'm only a salesgirl from a dime store, living in a place like this. He doesn't hold it against me."  "Uh-huh," said the sob sister; her face looked grim.  Cherryl remembered the wonder of the first time Jim Taggart had come here. He had come one evening, without warning, a month after their first meeting, when she had given up hope of ever seeing him again. She had been miserably embarrassed, she had felt as if she were trying to hold a sunrise within the space of a mud puddle-but Jim had smiled, sitting on her only chair, looking at her flushed face and at her room. Then he had told her to put on her coat, and he had taken her to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in the city.  He had smiled at her uncertainty, at her awkwardness, at her terror of picking the wrong fork, and at the look of enchantment in her eyes.  She had not known what he thought. But he had known that she was stunned, not by the place, but by his bringing her there, that she barely touched the costly food, that she took the dinner, not as booty from a rich sucker-as all the girls he knew would have taken it-but as some shining award she had never expected to deserve.  He had come back to her two weeks later, and then their dates had grown progressively more frequent. He would drive up to the dime store at the closing hour, and she would see her fellow salesgirls gaping at her, at his limousine, at the uniformed chauffeur who opened the door for her. He would take her to the best night clubs, and when he introduced her to his friends, he would say, "Miss Brooks works in the dime store in Madison Square." She would see the strange expressions on their faces and Jim watching them with a hint of mockery in his eyes. He wanted to spare her the need of pretense or embarrassment, she thought with gratitude. He had the strength to be honest and not to care whether others approved of him or not, she thought with admiration. But she felt an odd, burning pain, new to her, the night she heard some woman, who worked for a highbrow political magazine, say to her companion at the next table, "How generous of Jim!"  Had he wished, she would have given him the only kind of payment she could offer in return. She was grateful that he did not seek it. But she felt as if their relationship was an immense debt and she had nothing to pay it with, except her silent worship. He did not need her worship, she thought.  There were evenings when he came to take her out, but remained in her room, instead, and talked to her, while she listened in silence. It always happened unexpectedly, with a kind of peculiar abruptness, as if he had not intended doing it, but something burst within him and he had to speak. Then he sat slumped on her bed, unaware of his surroundings and of her presence, yet his eyes jerked to her face once in a while, as if he had to be certain that a living being heard him.  ". . . it wasn't for myself, it wasn't for myself at all-why won't they believe me, those people? I had to grant the unions' demands to cut down the trains-and the moratorium on bonds was the only way I could do it, so that's why Wesley gave it to me, for the workers, not for myself. All the newspapers said that I was a great example for all businessmen to follow-a businessman with a sense of social responsibility. That's what they said. It's true, isn't it? . . . Isn't it? . . .  “What was wrong about that moratorium? What if we did skip a few technicalities? It was for a good purpose. Everyone agrees that anything you do is good, so long as it's not for yourself. . . . But she won't give me credit for a good purpose. She doesn't think anybody's any good except herself. My sister is a ruthless, conceited bitch, who won't take anyone's ideas but her own. . . . Why do they keep looking at me that way-she and Rearden and all those people? Why are they so sure they're right? . . . If I acknowledge their superiority in the material realm, why don't they acknowledge mine in the spiritual?  “They have the brain, but I have the heart. They have the capacity to produce wealth, but I have the capacity to love. Isn't mine the greater capacity? Hasn't it been recognized as the greatest through all the centuries of human history? Why won't they recognize it? . . . Why are they so sure they're great? . . . And if they're great and I'm not -isn't that exactly why they should bow to me, because I'm not?  “Wouldn't that be an act of true humanity? It takes no kindness to respect a man who deserves respect-it's only a payment which he's earned. To give an unearned respect is the supreme gesture of charity. . . . But they're incapable of charity. They're not human. They feel no concern for anyone's need . . . or weakness. No concern . . . and no pity . . . "  She could understand little of it, but she understood that he was unhappy and that somebody had hurt him. He saw the pain of tenderness in her face, the pain of indignation against his enemies, and he saw the glance intended for heroes-given to him by a person able to experience the emotion behind that glance.  She did not know why she felt certain that she was the only one to whom he could confess his torture. She took it as a special honor, as one more gift.  The only way to be worthy of him, she thought, was never to ask him for anything. He offered her money once, and she refused it, with such a bright, painful flare of anger in her eyes that he did not attempt it again. The anger was at herself: she wondered whether she had done something to make him think she was that kind of person.  But she did not want to be ungrateful for his concern, or to embarrass him by her ugly poverty; she wanted to show him her eagerness to rise and justify his favor; so she told him that he could help her, if he wished, by helping her to find a better job. He did not answer. In the weeks that followed, she waited, but he never mentioned the subject.  She blamed herself: she thought that she had offended him, that he had taken it as an attempt to use him. When he gave her an emerald bracelet, she was too shocked to understand. Trying desperately not to hurt him, she pleaded that she could not accept it. "Why not?" he asked. "It isn't as if you were a bad woman paying the usual price for it. Are you afraid that I'll start making demands? Don't you trust me?" He laughed aloud at her stammering embarrassment. He smiled, with an odd kind of enjoyment, all through the evening when they went to a night club and she wore the bracelet with her shabby black dress.  He made her wear that bracelet again, on the night when he took her to a party, a great reception given by Mrs. Cornelias Pope. If he considered her good enough to bring into the home of his friends, she thought-the illustrious friends whose names she had seen on the inaccessible mountain peaks that were the society columns of the newspapers-she could not embarrass him by wearing her old dress. She spent her year's savings on an evening gown of bright green chiffon with a low neckline, a belt of yellow roses and a rhinestone buckle. When she entered the stern residence, with the cold, brilliant lights and a terrace suspended over the roofs of skyscrapers, she knew that her dress was wrong for the occasion, though she could not tell why. But she kept her posture proudly straight and she smiled with the courageous trust of a kitten when it sees a hand extended to play: people gathered to have a good time would not hurt anyone, she thought.  At the end of an hour, her attempt to smile had become a helpless, bewildered plea. Then the smile went, as she watched the people around her. She saw that the trim, confident girls had a nasty insolence of manner when they spoke to Jim, as if they did not respect him and never had. One of them in particular, a Betty Pope, the daughter of the hostess, kept making remarks to him which Cherryl could not understand, because she could not believe that she understood them correctly.  No one had paid any attention to her, at first, except for a few astonished glances at her gown. After a while, she saw them looking at her. She heard an elderly woman ask Jim, in the anxious tone of referring to some distinguished family she had missed knowing, "Did you say Miss Brooks of Madison Square?" She saw an odd smile on Jim's face, when he answered, making his voice sound peculiarly clear, "Yes -the cosmetics counter of Raleigh's Five and Ten." Then she saw some people becoming too polite to her, and others moving away in a pointed manner, and most of them being senselessly awkward in simple bewilderment, and Jim watching silently with that odd smile.  She tried to get out of the way, out of their notice. As she slipped by, along the edge of the room, she heard some man say, with a shrug, "Well, Jim Taggart is one of the most powerful men in Washington at the moment." He did not say it respectfully.  Out on the terrace, where it was darker, she heard two men talking and wondered why she felt certain that they were talking about her.  One of them said, "Taggart can afford to do it, if he pleases" and the other said something about the horse of some Roman emperor named Caligula.  She looked at the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building rising in the distance-and then she thought that she understood: these people hated Jim because they envied him. Whatever they were, she thought, whatever their names and their money, none of them had an achievement comparable to his, none of them had defied the whole country to build a railroad everybody thought impossible. For the first time, she saw that she did have something to offer Jim: these people were as mean and small as the people from whom she had escaped in Buffalo; he was as lonely as she had always been, and the sincerity of her feeling was the only recognition he had found.  Then she walked back into the ballroom, cutting straight through the crowd, and the only thing left of the tears she had tried to hold back in the darkness of the terrace, was the fiercely luminous sparkle of her eyes. If he wished to stand by her openly, even though she was only a shop girl, if he wished to flaunt it, if he had brought her here to face the indignation of his friends-then it was the gesture of a courageous man defying their opinion, and she was willing to match his courage by serving as the scarecrow of the occasion.  But she was glad when it was over, when she sat beside him in his car, driving home through the darkness. She felt a bleak kind of relief, Her battling defiance ebbed into a strange, desolate feeling; she tried not to give way to it. Jim said little; he sat looking sullenly out the car window; she wondered whether she had disappointed him in some manner.  On the stoop of her rooming house, she said to him forlornly, "I'm sorry if I let you down . . ."  He did not answer for a moment, and then he asked, "What would you say if I asked you to marry me?"  She looked at him, she looked around them-there was a filthy mattress hanging on somebody's window sill, a pawnshop across the street, a garbage pail at the stoop beside them-one did not ask such a question in such a place, she did not know what it meant, and she answered, "I guess I . . . I haven't any sense of humor."  "This is a proposal, my dear."  Then this was the way they reached their first kiss-with tears running down her face, tears unshed at the party, tears of shock, of happiness, of thinking that this should be happiness, and of a low, desolate voice telling her that this was not the way she would have wanted it to happen.  She had not thought about the newspapers, until the day when Jim told her to come to his apartment and she found it crowded with people who had notebooks, cameras and flash bulbs. When she saw her picture in the papers for the first time-a picture of them together, Jim's arm around her-she giggled with delight and wondered proudly whether every person in the city had seen it. After a while, the delight vanished.  They kept photographing her at the dime-store counter, in the subway, on the stoop of the tenement house, in her miserable room. She would have taken money from Jim now and run to hide in some obscure hotel for the weeks of their engagement-but he did not offer it.  He seemed to want her to remain where she was. They printed pictures of Jim at his desk, in the concourse of the Taggart Terminal, by the steps of his private railway car, at a formal banquet in Washington.  The huge spreads of full newspaper pages, the articles in magazines, the radio voices, the newsreels, all were a single, long, sustained scream-about the "Cinderella Girl" and the "Democratic Businessman."  She told herself not to be suspicious, when she felt uneasy; she told herself not to be ungrateful, when she felt hurt. She felt it only in a few rare moments, when she awakened in the middle of the night and lay in the silence of her room, unable to sleep. She knew that it would take her years to recover, to believe, to understand. She was reeling through her days like a person with a sunstroke, seeing nothing but the figure of Jim Taggart as she had seen him first on the night of his great triumph.  "Listen, kid," the sob sister said to her, when she stood in her room for the last time, the lace of the wedding veil streaming like crystal foam from her hair to the blotched planks of the floor. "You think that if one gets hurt in life, it's through one's own sins-and that's true, in the long run. But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you-knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that."  "I don't think I'm afraid," she said, looking intently straight before her, the radiance of her smile melting the earnestness of her glance. "I have no right to be afraid of anything. I'm too happy. You see, I always thought that there wasn't any sense in people saying that all you can do in life is suffer. I wasn't going to knuckle down to that and give up. I thought that things could happen which were beautiful and very great. I didn't expect it to happen to me-not so much and so soon. But I'll try to live up to it."  "Money is the root of all evil," said James Taggart. "Money can't buy happiness. Love will conquer any barrier and any social distance. That may be a bromide, boys, but that's how I feel."  He stood under the lights of the ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, in a circle of reporters who had closed about him the moment the wedding ceremony ended. He heard the crowd of guests beating like a tide beyond the circle. Cherryl stood beside him, her white gloved hand on the black of his sleeve. She was still trying to hear the words of the ceremony, not quite believing that she had heard them.  "How do you feel, Mrs. Taggart?"  She heard the question from somewhere in the circle of reporters. It was like the jolt of returning to consciousness: two words suddenly made everything real to her. She smiled and whispered, choking, "I . . . I'm very happy . . ."  At opposite ends of the ballroom, Orren Boyle, who seemed too stout for his full-dress clothes, and Bertram Scudder, who seemed too meager for his, surveyed the crowd of guests with the same thought, though neither of them admitted that he was thinking it. Orren Boyle half-told himself that he was looking for the faces of friends, and Bertram Scudder suggested to himself that he was gathering material for an article. But both, unknown to each other, were drawing a mental chart of the faces they saw, classifying them under two headings which, if named, would have read: "Favor" and "Fear." There were men whose presence signified a special protection extended to James Taggart, and men whose presence confessed a desire to avoid his hostility-those who represented a hand lowered to pull him up, and those who represented a back bent to let him climb. By the unwritten code of the day, nobody received or accepted an invitation from a man of public prominence except in token of one or the other of these motives.  Those in the first group were, for the most part, youthful; they had come from Washington. Those in the second group were older; they were businessmen.  Orren Boyle and Bertram Scudder were men who used words as a public instrument, to be avoided in the privacy of one's own mind.  Words were a commitment, carrying implications which they did not wish to face. They needed no words for their chart; the classification was done by physical means: a respectful movement of their eyebrows, equivalent to the emotion of the word "So!" for the first group-and a sarcastic movement of their lips, equivalent to the emotion of "Well, well!" for the second. One face blew up the smooth working of their calculating mechanisms for a moment: when they saw the cold blue eyes and blond hair of Hank Rearden, their muscles tore at the register of the second group in the equivalent of "Oh, boy!" The sum of the chart was an estimate of James Taggart's power. It added up to an impressive total.  They knew that James Taggart was fully aware of it, when they saw him moving among his guests. He walked briskly, in a Morse code pattern of short dashes and brief stops, with a manner of faint irritation, as if conscious of the number of people whom his displeasure might worry. The hint of a smile on his face had a flavor of gloating-as if he knew that the act of coming to honor him was an act that disgraced the men who had come; as if he knew and enjoyed it.  A tail of figures kept trailing and shifting behind him, as if their function were to give him the pleasure of ignoring them. Mr. Mowen flickered briefly among the tail, and Dr. Pritchett, and Balph Eubank.  The most persistent one was Paul Larkin. He kept describing circles around Taggart, as if trying to acquire a suntan by means of an occasional ray, his wistful smile pleading to be noticed.  Taggart's eyes swept over the crowd once in a while, swiftly and furtively, in the manner of a prowler's flashlight; this, in the muscular shorthand legible to Orren Boyle, meant that Taggart was looking for someone and did not want anyone to know it. The search ended when Eugene Lawson came to shake Taggart's hand and to say, his wet lower lip twisting like a cushion to soften the blow, "Mr. Mouch couldn't come, Jim, Mr. Mouch is so sorry, he had a special plane chartered, but at the last minute things came up, crucial national problems, you know." Taggart stood still, did not answer and frowned.  Orren Boyle burst out laughing. Taggart turned to him so sharply that the others melted away without waiting for a command to vanish.  "What do you think you're doing?" snapped Taggart.  "Having a good time, Jimmy, just having a good time," said Boyle. "Wesley is your boy, wasn't he?"  "I know somebody who's my boy and he'd better not forget it."  "Who? Larkin? Well, no, I don't think you're talking about Larkin. And if it's not Larkin that you're talking about, why then I think you ought to be careful in your use of the possessive pronouns. I don't mind the age classification, I know I look young for my years, but I'm just allergic to pronouns."  "That's very smart, but you're going to get too smart one of these days."  "If I do, you just go ahead and make the most of it, Jimmy."  "The trouble with people who overreach themselves is that they have short memories. You'd better remember who got Rearden Metal choked off the market for you."  "Why, I remember who promised to. That was the party who then pulled every string he could lay his hands on to try to prevent that particular directive from being issued, because he figured he might need rail of Rearden Metal in the future."  "Because you spent ten thousand dollars pouring liquor into people you hoped would prevent the directive about the bond moratorium!"  "That's right. So I did. I had friends who had railroad bonds. And besides, I have friends in Washington, too, Jimmy. Well, your friends beat mine on that moratorium business, but mine beat yours on Rearden Metal-and I'm not forgetting it. But what the hell!-it's all right with me, that's the way to share things around, only don't you try to fool me, Jimmy. Save the act for the suckers."  "If you don't believe that I've always tried to do my best for you-"  "Sure, you have. The best that could be expected, all things considered. And you'll continue to do it, too, so long as I've got somebody you need-and not a minute longer. So I just wanted to remind you that I've got my own friends in Washington. Friends that money can't buy-just like yours, Jimmy."  "What do you think you mean?"  "Just what you're thinking. The ones you buy aren't really worth a damn, because somebody can always offer them more, so the field's wide open to anybody and it's just like old-fashioned competition again. But if you get the goods on a man, then you've got him, then there's no higher bidder and you can count on his friendship. Well, you have friends, and so have I. You have friends I can use, and vice versa. That's all right with me-what the hell!-one's got to trade something. If we don't trade money-and the age of money is past-then we trade men."  "What is it you're driving at?"  "Why, I'm just telling you a few things that you ought to remember. Now take Wesley, for instance. You promised him the assistant's job in the Bureau of National Planning-for double-crossing Rearden, at the time of the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. You had the connections to do it, and that's what I asked you to do-in exchange for the Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule, where I had the connections. So Wesley did his part, and you saw to it that you got it all on paper-oh sure, I know that you've got written proof of the kind of deals he pulled to help pass that bill, while he was taking Rearden's money to defeat it and keeping Rearden off guard. They were pretty ugly deals. It would be pretty messy for Mr. Mouch, if it all came out in public. So you kept your promise and you got the job for him, because you thought you had him. And so you did. And he paid off pretty handsomely, didn't he? But it works only just so long. After a while, Mr. Wesley Mouch might get to be so powerful and the scandal so old, that nobody will care how he got his start or whom he double-crossed. Nothing lasts forever. Wesley was Rearden's man, and then he was your man, and he might be somebody else's man tomorrow "  "Are you giving me a hint?"  "Why no, I'm giving you a friendly warning. We're old friends. Jimmy, and I think that that's what we ought to remain. I think we can be very useful to each other, you and I, if you don't start getting the wrong ideas about friendship. Me-I believe in a balance of power."  "Did you prevent Mouch from coming here tonight?"  "Well, maybe I did and maybe I didn't. I'll let you worry about it. That's good for me, if I did-and still better, if I didn't."  Cherryl's eyes followed James Taggart through the crowd. The faces that kept shifting and gathering around her seemed so friendly and their voices were so eagerly warm that she felt certain there was no malice anywhere in the room. She wondered why some of them talked to her about Washington, in a hopeful, confidential manner of half sentences, half-hints, as if they were seeking her help for something secret she was supposed to understand. She did not know what to say, but she smiled and answered whatever she pleased. She could not disgrace the person of "Mrs. Taggart" by any touch of fear.  Then she saw the enemy. It was a tall, slender figure in a gray evening gown, who was now her sister-in-law.  The pressure of anger in Cherryl's mind was the stored accumulation of the sounds of Jim's tortured voice. She felt the nagging pull of a duty left undone. Her eyes kept returning to the enemy and studying her intently. The pictures of Dagny Taggart in the newspapers had shown a figure dressed in slacks, or a face with a slanting hat brim and a raised coat collar. Now she wore a gray evening gown that seemed indecent, because it looked austerely modest, so modest that it vanished from one's awareness and left one too aware of the slender body it pretended to cover. There was a tone of blue in the gray cloth that went with the gun-metal gray of her eyes. She wore no jewelry, only a bracelet on her wrist, a chain of heavy metal links with a green blue cast.  Cherryl waited, until she saw Dagny standing alone, then tore forward, cutting resolutely across the room. She looked at close range into the gun-metal eyes that seemed cold and intense at once, the eyes that looked at her directly with a polite, impersonal curiosity.  "There's something I want you to know," said Cherryl, her voice taut and harsh, "so that there won't be any pretending about it. I'm not going to put on the sweet relative act. I know what you've done to Jim and how you've made him miserable all his life. I'm going to protect him against you. I'll put you in your place. I'm Mrs. Taggart. I'm the woman in this family now."  "That's quite all right," said Dagny. "I'm the man."  Cherryl watched her walk away, and thought that Jim had been right: this sister of his was a creature of cold evil who had given her no response, no acknowledgment, no emotion of any kind except a touch of something that looked like an astonished, indifferent amusement.  Rearden stood by Lillian's side and followed her when she moved.  She wished to be seen with her husband; he was complying. He did not know whether anyone looked at him or not; he was aware of no one around them, except the person whom he could not permit himself to see.  The image still holding his consciousness was the moment when he had entered this room with Lillian and had seen Dagny looking at them. He had looked straight at her, prepared to accept any blow her eyes would choose to give him. Whatever the consequences to Lillian, he would have confessed his adultery publicly, there and in that moment, rather than commit the unspeakable act of evading Dagny's eyes, of closing his face into a coward's blankness, of pretending to her that he did not know the nature of his action.  But there had been no blow. He knew every shade of sensation ever reflected in Dagny's face; he had known that she had felt no shock; he had seen nothing but an untouched serenity. Her eyes had moved to his, as if acknowledging the full meaning of this encounter, but looking at him as she would have looked anywhere, as she looked at him in his office or in her bedroom. It had seemed to him that she had stood before them both, at the distance of a few steps, revealed to them as simply and openly as the gray dress revealed her body.  She had bowed to them, the courteous movement of her head including them both. He had answered, he had seen Lillian's brief nod, and then he had seen Lillian moving away and realized that he had stood with his head bowed for a long moment.  He did not know what Lillian's friends were saying to him or what he was answering. As a man goes step by step, trying not to think of the length of a hopeless road, so he went moment by moment, keeping no imprint of anything in his mind. He heard snatches of Lillian's pleased laughter and a tone of satisfaction in her voice.  After a while, he noticed the women around him; they all seemed to resemble Lillian, with the same look of static grooming, with thin eyebrows plucked to a static lift and eyes frozen in static amusement. He noticed that they were trying to flirt with him, and that Lillian watched it as if she were enjoying the hopelessness of their attempts. This, then -he thought-was the happiness of feminine vanity which she had begged him to give her, these were the standards which he did not live by, but had to consider. He turned for escape to a group of men.  He could not find a single straight statement in the conversation of the men; whatever subject they seemed to be talking about never seemed to be the subject they were actually discussing. He listened like a foreigner who recognized some of the words, but could not connect them into sentences. A young man, with a look of alcoholic insolence, staggered past the group and snapped, chuckling, "Learned your lesson, Rearden?" He did not know what the young rat had meant; everybody else seemed to know it; they looked shocked and secretly pleased.  Lillian drifted away from him, as if letting him understand that she did not insist upon his literal attendance. He retreated to a corner of the room where no one would see him or notice the direction of his eyes. Then he permitted himself to look at Dagny.  He watched the gray dress, the shifting movement of the soft cloth when she walked, the momentary pauses sculptured by the cloth, the shadows and the light. He saw it as a bluish-gray smoke held shaped for an instant into a long curve that slanted forward to her knee and back to the tip of her sandal. He knew every facet the light would shape if the smoke were ripped away.  He felt a murky, twisting pain: it was jealousy of every man who spoke to her. He had never felt it before; but he felt it here, where everyone had the right to approach her, except himself.  Then, as if a single, sudden blow to his brain blasted a moment's shift of perspective, he felt an immense astonishment at what he was doing here and why. He lost, for that moment, all the days and dogmas of his past; his concepts, his problems, his pain were wiped out; he knew only-as from a great, clear distance-that man exists for the achievement of his desires, and he wondered why he stood here, he wondered who had the right to demand that he waste a single irreplaceable hour of his life, when his only desire was to seize the slender figure in gray and hold her through the length of whatever time there was left for him to exist.  In the next moment, he felt the shudder of recapturing his mind. He felt the tight, contemptuous movement of his lips pressed together in token of the words he cried to himself: You made a contract once, now stick to it. And then he thought suddenly that in business transactions the courts of law did not recognize a contract wherein no valuable consideration had been given by one party to the other. He wondered what made him think of it. The thought seemed irrelevant. He did not pursue it.  James Taggart saw Lillian Rearden drift casually toward him at the one moment when he chanced to be alone in the dim corner between a potted palm and a window. He stopped and waited to let her approach.  He could not guess her purpose, but this was the manner which, in the code he understood, meant that he had better hear her.  "How do you like my wedding gift, Jim?" she asked, and laughed at his look of embarrassment. "No, no, don't try to go over the list of things in your apartment, wondering which one the hell it was. It's not in your apartment, it's right here, and it's a non-material gift, darling."  He saw the half-hint of a smile on her face, the look understood among his friends as an invitation to share a secret victory; it was the look, not of having outthought, but of having outsmarted somebody.  He answered cautiously, with a safely pleasant smile, "Your presence is the best gift you could give me."  "My presence, Jim?"  The lines of his face were shock-bound for a moment. He knew what she meant, but he had not expected her to mean it.  She smiled openly. "We both know whose presence is the most valuable one for you tonight-and the unexpected one. Didn't you really think of giving me credit for it? I'm surprised at you. I thought you had a genius for recognizing potential friends."  He would not commit himself; he kept his voice carefully neutral.  "Have I failed to appreciate your friendship, Lillian?"  "Now, now, darling, you know what I'm talking about. You didn't expect him to come here, you didn't really think that he is afraid of you, did you? But to have the others think he is-that's quite an inestimable advantage, isn't it?"  "I'm . . . surprised, Lillian."  "Shouldn't you say 'impressed'? Your guests are quite impressed. I can practically hear them thinking all over the room. Most of them are thinking: 'If he has to seek terms with Jim Taggart, we'd better toe the line.' And a few are thinking: 'If he's afraid, we'll get away with much more.' This is as you want it, of course-and I wouldn't think of spoiling your triumph-but you and I are the only ones who know that you didn't achieve it single-handed."  He did not smile; he asked, his face blank, his voice smooth, but with a carefully measured hint of harshness, "What's your angle?"  She laughed. "Essentially-the same as yours, Jim. But speaking practically-none at all. It's just a favor I've done you, and I need no favor in return. Don't worry, I'm not lobbying for any special interests, I'm not after squeezing some particular directive out of Mr. Mouch, I'm not even after a diamond tiara from you. Unless, of course, it's a tiara of a non-material order, such as your appreciation."  He looked straight at her for the first time, his eyes narrowed, his face relaxed to the same half-smile as hers, suggesting the expression which, for both of them, meant that they felt at home with each other: an expression of contempt. "You know that I have always admired you, Lillian, as one of the truly superior women."  "I'm aware of it." There was the faintest coating of mockery spread, like shellac, over the smooth notes of her voice.  He was studying her insolently. "You must forgive me if I think that some curiosity is permissible between friends," he said, with no tone of apology. "I'm wondering from what angle you contemplate the possibility of certain financial burdens-or losses-which affect your own personal interests."  She shrugged. "From the angle of a horsewoman, darling. If you had the most powerful horse in the world, you would keep it bridled down to the gait required to carry you in comfort, even though this meant the sacrifice of its full capacity, even though its top speed would never be seen and its great power would be wasted. You would do it-because if you let the horse go full blast, it would throw you off in no time. . . . However, financial aspects are not my chief concern -nor yours, Jim."  "I did underestimate you," he said slowly.  "Oh, well, that's an error I'm willing to help you correct. I know the sort of problem he presents to you. I know why you're afraid of him, as you have good reason to be. But . . . well, you're in business and in politics, so I'll try to say it in your language. A businessman says that he can deliver the goods, and a ward heeler says that he can deliver the vote, is that right? Well, what I wanted you to know is that I can deliver him, any time I choose. You may act accordingly."  In the code of his friends, to reveal any part of one's self was to give a weapon to an enemy-but he signed her confession and matched it, when he said, "I wish I were as smart about my sister."  She looked at him without astonishment; she did not find the words irrelevant. "Yes, there's a tough one," she said. "No vulnerable point?  No weaknesses?"  "None."  "No love affairs?"  "God, no!"  She shrugged, in sign of changing the subject; Dagny Taggart was a person on whom she did not care to dwell. "I think I'll let you run along, so that you can chat a little with Balph Eubank," she said. "He looks worried, because you haven't looked at him all evening and he's wondering whether literature will be left without a friend at court."  "Lillian, you're wonderful!" he said quite spontaneously.  She laughed. "That, my dear, is the non-material tiara I wanted!"  The remnant of a smile stayed on her face as she moved through the crowd, a fluid smile that ran softly into the look of tension and boredom worn by all the faces around her. She moved at random, enjoying the sense of being seen, her eggshell satin gown shimmering like heavy cream with the motion of her tall figure.  It was the green-blue spark that caught her attention: it flashed for an instant under the lights, on the wrist of a thin, naked arm. Then she saw the slender body, the gray dress, the fragile, naked shoulders. She stopped. She looked at the bracelet, frowning.  Dagny turned at her approach. Among the many things that Lillian resented, the impersonal politeness of Dagny's face was the one she resented most.  "What do you think of your brother's marriage, Miss Taggart?" she asked casually, smiling.  "I have no opinion about it."  "Do you mean to say that you don't find it worthy of any thought?"  "If you wish to be exact-yes, that's what I mean."  "Oh, but don't you see any human significance in it?"  "No."  "Don't you think that a person such as your brother's bride does deserve some interest?"  "Why, no."  "I envy you, Miss Taggart. I envy your Olympian detachment. It is, I think, the secret of why lesser mortals can never hope to equal your success in the field of business. They allow their attention to be divided-at least to the extent of acknowledging achievements in other fields."  "What achievements are we talking about?"  "Don't you grant any recognition at all to the women who attain unusual heights of conquest, not in the industrial, but in the human realm?"  "I don't think that there is such a word as 'conquest'-in the human realm."  "Oh, but consider, for instance, how hard other women would have had to work-if work were the only means available to them-to achieve what this girl has achieved through the person of your brother."  "1 don't think she knows the exact nature of what she has achieved."  Rearden saw them together. He approached. He felt that he had to hear it, no matter what the consequences. He stopped silently beside them. He did not know whether Lillian was aware of his presence; he knew that Dagny was.  "Do show a little generosity toward her, Miss Taggart," said Lillian.  "At least, the generosity of attention. You must not despise the women who do not possess your brilliant talent, but who exercise their own particular endowments. Nature always balances her gifts and offers compensations-don't you think so?"  "I'm not sure I understand you."  "Oh, I'm sure you don't want to hear me become more explicit!"  "Why, yes, I do."  Lillian shrugged angrily; among the women who were her friends, she would have been understood and stopped long ago; but this was an adversary new to her-a woman who refused to be hurt. She did not care to speak more clearly, but she saw Rearden looking at her.  She smiled and said, "Well, consider your sister-in-law, Miss Taggart. What chance did she have to rise in the world? None-by your exacting standards. She could not have made a successful career in business. She does not possess your unusual mind. Besides, men would have made it impossible for her. They would have found her too attractive. So she took advantage of the fact that men have standards which, unfortunately, are not as high as yours. She resorted to talents which, I'm sure, you despise. You have never cared to compete with us lesser women in the sole field of our ambition-in the achievement of power over men."  "If you call it power, Mrs. Rearden-then, no, I haven't."  She turned to go, but Lillian's voice stopped her: "I would like to believe that you're fully consistent, Miss Taggart, and fully devoid of human frailties. I would like to believe that you've never felt the desire to flatter-or to offend-anyone. But I see that you expected both Henry and me to be here tonight."  "Why, no, I can't say that I did, I had not seen my brother's guest list."  "Then why are you wearing that bracelet?"  Dagny's eyes moved deliberately straight to hers. "I always wear it."  "Don't you think that that's carrying a joke too far?"  "It was never a joke, Mrs. Rearden."  "Then you'll understand me if I say that I'd like you to give that bracelet back to me."  "I understand you. But I will not give it back."  Lillian let a moment pass, as if to let them both acknowledge the meaning of their silence. For once, she held Dagny's glance without smiling. "What do you expect me to think, Miss Taggart?"  "Anything you wish."  "What is your motive?"  "You knew my motive when you gave me the bracelet."  Lillian glanced at Rearden. His face was expressionless; she saw no reaction, no hint of intention to help her or stop her, nothing but an attentiveness that made her feel as if she were standing in a spotlight.  Her smile came back, as a protective shield, an amused, patronizing smile, intended to convert the subject into a drawing-room issue again. "I'm sure, Miss Taggart, that you realize how enormously improper this is."  "No."  "But surely you know that you are taking a dangerous and ugly risk."  "No."  "You do not take into consideration the possibility of being . . .misunderstood?"  "No."  Lillian shook her head in smiling reproach. "Miss Taggart, don't you think that this is a case where one cannot afford to indulge in abstract theory, but must consider practical reality?"  Dagny would not smile. "I have never understood what is meant by a statement of that kind."  "I mean that your attitude may be highly idealistic-as I am sure it is-but, unfortunately, most people do not share your lofty frame of mind and will misinterpret your action in the one manner which would be most abhorrent to you."  "Then the responsibility and the risk will be theirs, not mine."  "I admire your . . . no, I must not say 'innocence,' but shall I say 'purity?' You have never thought of it, I'm sure, but life is not as straight and logical as . . . as a railroad track. It is regrettable, but possible, that your high intentions may lead people to suspect things which . . . well, which I'm sure you know to be of a sordid and scandalous nature."  Dagny was looking straight at her. "I don't."  "But you cannot ignore that possibility."  "I do." Dagny turned to go.  "Oh, but should you wish to evade a discussion if you have nothing to hide?" Dagny stopped. "And if your brilliant-and reckless courage permits you to gamble with your reputation, should you ignore the danger to Mr. Rearden?"  Dagny asked slowly, "What is the danger to Mr. Rearden?"  'Tm sure you understand me."  "I don't."  "Oh, but surely it isn't necessary to be more explicit."  "It is-if you wish to continue this discussion."  Lillian's eyes went to Rearden's face, searching for some sign to help her decide whether to continue or to stop. He would not help her.  "Miss Taggart" she said, "I am not your equal in philosophical altitude. I am only an average wife. Please give me that bracelet-if you do not wish me to think what I might think and what you wouldn't want me to name."  "Mrs. Rearden, is this the manner and place in which you choose to suggest that I am sleeping with your husband?"  "Certainly not!" The cry was immediate; it had a sound of panic and the quality of an automatic reflex, like the jerk of withdrawal of a pickpocket's hand caught in action. She added, with an angry, nervous chuckle, in a tone of sarcasm and sincerity that confessed a reluctant admission of her actual opinion, "That would be the possibility farthest from my mind."  "Then you will please apologize to Miss Taggart," said Rearden.  Dagny caught her breath, cutting off all but the faint echo of a gasp.  They both whirled to him. Lillian saw nothing in his face; Dagny saw torture.  "It isn't necessary, Hank," she said.  "It is-for me," he answered coldly, not looking at her; he was looking at Lillian in the manner of a command that could not be disobeyed.  Lillian studied his face with mild astonishment, but without anxiety or anger, like a person confronted by a puzzle of no significance.  "But of course," she said complaisantly, her voice smooth and confident again. "Please accept my apology, Miss Taggart, if I gave you the impression that I suspected the existence of a relationship which I would consider improbable for you and-from my knowledge of his inclinations-impossible for my husband."  She turned and walked away indifferently, leaving them together, as if in deliberate proof of her words.  Dagny stood still, her eyes closed; she was thinking of the night when Lillian had given her the bracelet. He had taken his wife's side, then; he had taken hers, now. Of the three of them, she was the only one who understood fully what this meant.  "Whatever is the worst you may wish to say to me, you will be right."  She heard him and opened her eyes. He was looking at her coldly, his face harsh, allowing no sign of pain or apology to suggest a hope of forgiveness.  "Dearest, don't torture yourself like that," she said. "I knew that you're married. I've never tried to evade that knowledge. I'm not hurt by it tonight."  Her first word was the most violent of the several blows he felt: she had never used that word before. She had never let him hear that particular tone of tenderness. She had never spoken of his marriage in the privacy of their meetings-yet she spoke of it here with effortless simplicity.  She saw the anger in his face-the rebellion against pity-the look of saying to her contemptuously that he had betrayed no torture and needed no help-then the look of the realization that she knew his face as thoroughly as he knew hers-he closed his eyes, he inclined his head a little, and he said very quietly, "Thank you."  She smiled and turned away from him.  James Taggart held an empty champagne glass in his hand and noticed the haste with which Balph Eubank waved at a passing waiter, as if the waiter were guilty of an unpardonable lapse. Then Eubank completed his sentence: "-but you, Mr. Taggart, would know that a man who lives on a higher plane cannot be understood or appreciated. It's a hopeless struggle-trying to obtain support for literature from a world ruled by businessmen. They are nothing but stuffy, middle-class vulgarians or else predatory savages like Rearden."  "Jim," said Bertram Scudder, slapping his shoulder, "the best compliment I can pay you is that you're not a real businessman!"  "You're a man of culture, Jim," said Dr. Pritchett, "you're not an ex-ore-digger like Rearden. I don't have to explain to you the crucial need of Washington assistance to higher education."  "You really liked my last novel, Mr. Taggart?" Balph Eubank kept asking. "You really liked it?"  Orren Boyle glanced at the group, on his way across the room, but did not stop. The glance was sufficient to give him an estimate of the nature of the group's concerns. Fair enough, he thought, one's got to trade something. He knew, but did not care to name just what was being traded.  "We arc at the dawn of a new age," said James Taggart, from above the rim of his champagne glass. "We are breaking up the vicious tyranny of economic power. We will set men free of the rule of the dollar. We will release our spiritual aims from dependence on the owners of material means. We will liberate our culture from the stranglehold of the profit-chasers. We will build a society dedicated to higher ideals, and we will replace the aristocracy of money by-"  "-the aristocracy of pull," said a voice beyond the group.  They whirled around. The man who stood facing them was Francisco d'Anconia.  His face looked tanned by a summer sun, and his eyes were the exact color of the sky on the kind of day when he had acquired his tan.  His smile suggested a summer morning. The way he wore his formal clothes made the rest of the crowd look as if they were masquerading in borrowed costumes.  "What's the matter?" he asked in the midst of their silence. "Did I say something that somebody here didn't know?"  "How did you get here?" was the first thing James Taggart found himself able to utter.  "By plane to Newark, by taxi from there, then by elevator from my suite fifty-three floors above you."  "I didn't mean . . . that is, what I meant was-"  "Don't look so startled, James. If I land in New York and hear that there's a party going on, I wouldn't miss it, would I? You've always said that I'm just a party hound."  The group was watching them.  "I'm delighted to see you, of course," Taggart said cautiously, then added belligerently, to balance it, "But if you think you're going to-"  Francisco would not pick up the threat; he let Taggart's sentence slide into mid-air and stop, then asked politely, "If I think what?"  "You understand me very well."  "Yes. I do. Shall I tell you what I think?"  "This is hardly the moment for any-"  "I think you should present me to your bride, James. Your manners have never been glued to you too solidly-you always lose them in an emergency, and that's the time when one needs them most."  Turning to escort him toward Cherryl, Taggart caught the faint sound that came from Bertram Scudder; it was an unborn chuckle. Taggart knew that the men who had crawled at his feet a moment ago, whose hatred for Francisco d'Anconia was, perhaps, greater than his own, were enjoying the spectacle none the less. The implications of this knowledge were among the things he did not care to name.  Francisco bowed to Cherryl and offered his best wishes, as if she were the bride of a royal heir. Watching nervously, Taggart felt relief-and a touch of nameless resentment, which, if named, would have told him he wished the occasion deserved the grandeur that Francisco's manner gave it for a moment.  He was afraid to remain by Francisco's side and afraid to let him loose among the guests. He backed a few tentative steps away, but Francisco followed him, smiling.  "You didn't think I'd want to miss your wedding, James-when you're my childhood friend and best stockholder?"  "What?" gasped Taggart, and regretted it: the sound was a confession of panic.  Francisco did not seem to take note of it; he said, his voice gaily innocent, "Oh, but of course I know it. I know the stooge behind the stooge behind every name on the list of the stockholders of d'Anconia Copper. It's surprising how many men by the name of Smith and Gomez are rich enough to own big chunks of the richest corporation in the world-so you can't blame me if I was curious to learn what distinguished persons I actually have among my minority stockholders. I seem to be popular with an astonishing collection of public figures from all over the world-from People's States where you wouldn't think there's any money left at all."  Taggart said dryly, frowning, "There are many reasons-business reasons-why it is sometimes advisable not to make one's investments directly."  "One reason is that a man doesn't want people to know he's rich. Another is that he doesn't want them to learn how he got that way."  "I don't know what you mean or why you should object."  "Oh, I don't object at all. I appreciate it. A great many investors -the old-fashioned sort-dropped me after the San Sebastian Mines. It scared them away. But the modern ones had more faith in me and acted as they always do-on faith. I can't tell you how thoroughly I appreciate it."  Taggart wished Francisco would not talk so loudly; he wished people would not gather around them. "You have been doing extremely well," he said, in the safe tone of a business compliment.  "Yes, haven't I? It's wonderful how the stock of d'Anconia Copper has risen within the last year. But I don't think I should be too conceited about it-there's not much competition left in the world, there's no place to invest one's money, if one happens to get rich quickly, and here's d'Anconia Copper, the oldest company on earth, the one that's been the safest bet for centuries. Just think of what it managed to survive through the ages. So if you people have decided that it's the best place for your hidden money, that it can't be beaten, that it would take a most unusual kind of man to destroy d'Anconia Copper-you were right."  "Well, I hear it said that you've begun to take your responsibilities seriously and that you've settled down to business at last. They say you've been working very hard."  "Oh, has anybody noticed that? It was the old-fashioned investors who made it a point to watch what the president of a company was doing. The modern investors don't find knowledge necessary. I don't think they ever look into my activities."  Taggart smiled. "They look at the ticker tape of the stock exchange. That tells the whole story, doesn't it?"  "Yes. Yes, it does-in the long run."  "I must say I'm glad that you haven't been much of a party hound this past year. The results show in your work."  "Do they? Well, no, not quite yet."  "I suppose," said Taggart, in the cautious tone of an indirect question, "that I should feel flattered you chose to come to this party."  "Oh, but I had to come. I thought you were expecting me."  "Why, no, I wasn't . . . that is, I mean-"  "You should have expected me, James. This is the great, formal, nose-counting event, where the victims come in order to show how safe it is to destroy them, and the destroyers form pacts of eternal friendship, which lasts for three months. I don't know exactly which group I belong to, but I had to come and be counted, didn't I?"  "What in hell do you think you're saying?" Taggart cried furiously, seeing the tension on the faces around them.  "Be careful, James. If you try to pretend that you don't understand me, I'm going to make it much clearer."  "If you think it's proper to utter such-"  "I think it's funny. There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they're afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever thought that that's all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns-just somebody naming the exact nature of what you're doing?"  "If you think it's proper to come to a celebration such as a wedding, in order to insult the host-"  "Why, James, I came here to thank you."  "To thank me?"  "Of course. You've done me a great favor-you and your boys in Washington and the boys in Santiago. Only I wonder why none of you took the trouble to inform me about it. Those directives that somebody issued here a few months ago are choking off the entire copper industry of this country. And the result is that this country suddenly has to import much larger amounts of copper. And where in the world is there any copper left-unless it's d'Anconia copper? So you see that I have good reason to be grateful."  "1 assure you I had nothing to do with it," Taggart said hastily, "and besides, the vital economic policies of this country are not determined by any considerations such as you're intimating or--"  "I know how they're determined, James. I know that the deal started with the boys in Santiago, because they've been on the d'Anconia pay roll for centuries-well, no, 'pay roll' is an honorable word, it would be more exact to say that d'Anconia Copper has been paying them protection money for centuries-isn't that what your gangsters call it? Our boys in Santiago call it taxes. They've been getting their cut on every ton of d'Anconia copper sold. So they have a vested interest to see me sell as many tons as possible. But with the world turning into People's States, this is the only country left where men are not yet reduced to digging for roots in forests for their sustenance-so this is the only market left on earth. The boys in Santiago wanted to corner this market. I don't know what they offered to the boys in Washington, or who traded what and to whom-but I know that you came in on it somewhere, because you do hold a sizable chunk of d'Anconia Copper stock. And it surely didn't displease you-that morning, four months ago, the day after the directives were issued-to see the kind of soaring leap that d'Anconia Copper performed on the Stock Exchange. Why, it practically leaped off the ticker tape and into your face."  "Who gave you any grounds to invent an outrageous story of this kind?"  "Nobody. I knew nothing about it. I just saw the leap on the ticker tape that morning. That told the whole story, didn't it? Besides, the boys in Santiago slapped a new tax on copper the following week-and they told me that I shouldn't mind it, not with that sudden rise of my stock. They were working for my best interests, they said. They said, why should I care-taking the two events together, I was richer than I had been before. True enough. I was."  "Why do you wish to tell me this?"  "Why don't you wish to take any credit for it, James? That's out of character and out of the policy at which you're such an expert. In an age when men exist, not by right, but by favor, one does not reject a grateful person, one tries to trap into gratitude as many people as possible. Don't you want to have me as one of your men under obligation?"  "I don't know what you're talking about."  "Think what a favor I received without any effort on my part. I wasn't consulted, I wasn't informed, I wasn't thought about, everything was arranged without me-and all I have to do now is produce the copper. That was a great favor, James-and you may be sure that I will repay it."  Francisco turned abruptly, not waiting for an answer, and started away. Taggart did not follow; he stood, feeling that anything was preferable to one more minute of their conversation.  Francisco stopped when he came to Dagny. He looked at her for a silent instant, without greeting, his smile acknowledging that she had been the first person he saw and the first one to see him at his entrance into the ballroom.  Against every doubt and warning in her mind, she felt nothing but a joyous confidence; inexplicably, she felt as if his figure in that crowd was a point of indestructible security. But in the moment when the beginning of a smile told him how glad she was to see him, he asked, "Don't you want to tell me what a brilliant achievement the John Galt Line turned out to be?"  She felt her lips trembling and tightening at once, as she answered, 'Tm sorry if I show that I'm still open to be hurt. It shouldn't shock me that you've come to the stage where you despise achievement."  "Yes; don't I? I despised that Line so much that I didn't want to see it reach the kind of end it has reached."  He saw her look of sudden attentiveness, the look of thought rushing into a breach torn open upon a new direction. He watched her for a moment, as if he knew every step she would find along that road, then chuckled and said, "Don't you want to ask me now: Who is John Galt?"  "Why should I want to, and why now?"  "Don't you remember that you dared him to come and claim your Line? Well, he has."  He walked on, not waiting to sec the look in her eyes-a look that held anger, bewilderment and the first faint gleam of a question mark.  It was the muscles of his own face that made Rearden realize the nature of his reaction to Francisco's arrival: he noticed suddenly that he was smiling and that his face had been relaxed into the dim well being of a smile for some minutes past, as he watched Francisco d'Anconia in the crowd.  He acknowledged to himself, for the first time, all the half-grasped, half-rejected moments when he had thought of Francisco d'Anconia and thrust the thought aside before it became the knowledge of how much he wanted to see him again. In moments of sudden exhaustion-at his desk, with the fires of the furnaces going down in the twilight-in the darkness of the lonely walk through the empty countryside to his house-in the silence of sleepless nights-he had found himself thinking of the only man who had once seemed to be his spokesman.  He had pushed the memory aside, telling himself: But that one is worse than all the others-while feeling certain that this was not true, yet being unable to name the reason of his certainty. He had caught himself glancing through the newspapers to see whether Francisco d'Anconia had returned to New York-and he had thrown the newspapers aside, asking himself angrily: What if he did return?-would you go chasing him through night clubs and cocktail parties?-what is it that you want from him?  This was what he had wanted-he thought, when he caught himself smiling at the sight of Francisco in the crowd-this strange feeling of expectation that held curiosity, amusement and hope.  Francisco did not seem to have noticed him. Rearden waited, fighting a desire to approach; not after the kind of conversation we had, he thought-what for?-what would I say to him? And then, with the same smiling, light-hearted feeling, the feeling of being certain that it was right, he found himself walking across the ballroom, toward the group that surrounded Francisco d'Anconia.  He wondered, looking at them, why these people were drawn to Francisco, why they chose to hold him imprisoned in a clinging circle when their resentment of him was obvious under their smiles. Their faces had the hint of a look peculiar, not to fear, but to cowardice: a look of guilty anger. Francisco stood cornered against the side edge of a marble stairway, half-leaning, half-sitting on the steps; the informality of his posture, combined with the strict formality of his clothes, gave him an air of superlative elegance. His was the only face that had the carefree look and the brilliant smile proper to the enjoyment of a party; but his eyes seemed intentionally expressionless, holding no trace of gaiety, showing-like a warning signal-nothing but the activity of a heightened perceptiveness.  Standing unnoticed on the edge of the group, Rearden heard a woman, who had large diamond earrings and a flabby, nervous face, ask tensely, "Senior d'Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?"  "Just exactly what it deserves."  "Oh, how cruel!"  "Don't you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?" Francisco asked gravely. "I do."  Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil-and he's the typical product of money."  Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.  "So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?  "When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor-your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?  "Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions-and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.  "But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made-before it can be looted or mooched-made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.  "To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss-the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery-that you must offer them values, not wounds-that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods.  “Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade-with reason, not force, as their final arbiter-it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability-and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?  "But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality-the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.  "Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?  "Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth-the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?  "Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?  "Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?  "Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money-and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.  "Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.  "Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another-their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.  "But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich-will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt-and of his life, as he deserves.  "Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard-the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money-the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law-men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims-then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.  "Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion-when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing-when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors-when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you-when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice-you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.  "Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'  "When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.  "You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves-slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers-as industrialists.  "To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money-and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being-the self-made man-the American industrialist.  "If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose-because it contains all the others-the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity-to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.  "Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-as, I think, he will.  "Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns-or dollars. Take your choice-there is no other-and your time is running out."  Francisco had not glanced at Rearden once while speaking; but the moment he finished, his eyes went straight to Rearden's face. Rearden stood motionless, seeing nothing but Francisco d'Anconia across the moving figures and angry voices between them.  There were people who had listened, but now hurried away, and people who said, "It's horrible!"-"It's not true!"-"How vicious and selfish!"-saying it loudly and guardedly at once, as if wishing that their neighbors would hear them, but hoping that Francisco would not.  "Senor d'Anconia," declared the woman with the earrings, "I don't agree with you!"  "If you can refute a single sentence I uttered, madame, I shall hear it gratefully."  "Oh, I can't answer you. I don't have any answers, my mind doesn't work that way, but I don't feel that you're right, so I know that you're wrong."  "How do you know it?"  "I feel it. I don't go by my head, but by my heart. You might be good at logic, but you're heartless."  "Madame, when we'll see men dying of starvation around us, your heart won't be of any earthly use to save them. And I'm heartless enough to say that when you'll scream, 'But I didn't know it!'-you will not be forgiven."  The woman turned away, a shudder running through the flesh of her cheeks and through the angry tremor of her voice: "Well, it's certainly a funny way to talk at a party!"  A portly man with evasive eyes said loudly, his tone of forced cheerfulness suggesting that his sole concern in any issue was not to let it become unpleasant, "If this is the way you feel about money, Senor, I think I'm darn glad that I've got a goodly piece of d'Anconia Copper stock."  Francisco said gravely, "I suggest that you think twice, sir."  Rearden started toward him-and Francisco, who had not seemed to look in his direction, moved to meet him at once, as if the others had never existed.  "Hello," said Rearden simply, easily, as to a childhood friend; he was smiling.  He saw his own smile reflected in Francisco's face. "Hello."  "I want to speak to you."  "To whom do you think I've been speaking for the last quarter of an hour?"  Rearden chuckled, in the manner of acknowledging an opponent's round. "I didn't think you had noticed me."  "I noticed, when I came in, that you were one of the only two persons in this room who were glad to see me."  "Aren't you being presumptuous?"  "No-grateful."  "Who was the other person glad to see you?"  Francisco shrugged and said lightly, "A woman."  Rearden noticed that Francisco had led him aside, away from the group, in so skillfully natural a manner that neither he nor the others had known it was being done intentionally.  "I didn't expect to find you here," said Francisco. "You shouldn't have come to this party."  "Why not?"  "May I ask what made you come?"  "My wife was anxious to accept the invitation."  "Forgive me if I put it in such form, but it would have been more proper and less dangerous if she had asked you to take her on a tour of whorehouses."  "What danger are you talking about?"  "Mr. Rearden, you do not know these people's way of doing business or how they interpret your presence here. In your code, but not in theirs, accepting a man's hospitality is a token of good will, a declaration that you and your host stand on terms of a civilized relationship.  Don't give them that kind of sanction."  "Then why did you come here?"  Francisco shrugged gaily. "Oh, I-it doesn't matter what I do. I'm only a party hound."  "What are you doing at this party?"  "Just looking for conquests."  "Found any?"  His face suddenly earnest, Francisco answered gravely, almost solemnly, "Yes-what I think is going to be my best and greatest."  Rearden's anger was involuntary, the cry, not of reproach, but of despair: "How can you waste yourself that way?"  The faint suggestion of a smile, like the rise of a distant light, came into Francisco's eyes as he asked, "Do you care to admit that you care about it?"  "You're going to hear a few more admissions, if that's what you're after. Before I met you, I used to wonder how you could waste a fortune such as yours. Now it's worse, because I can't despise you as I did, as I'd like to, yet the question is much more terrible: How can you waste a mind such as yours?"  "I don't think I'm wasting it right now."  "I don't know whether there's ever been anything that meant a damn to you-but I'm going to tell you what I've never said to anyone before. When I met you, do you remember that you said you wanted to offer me your gratitude?"  There was no trace of amusement left in Francisco's eyes; Rearden had never faced so solemn a look of respect, "Yes, Mr. Rearden," he answered quietly.  "I told you that I didn't need it and I insulted you for it. All right, you've won. That speech you made tonight-that was what you were offering me, wasn't it?"  "Yes, Mr. Rearden."  "It was more than gratitude, and I needed the gratitude; it was more than admiration, and I needed that, too; it was much more than any word I can find, it will take me days to think of all that it's given me-but one thing I do know: I needed it. I've never made an admission of this kind, because I've never cried for anyone's help. If it amused you to guess that I was glad to see you, you have something real to laugh about now, if you wish."  "It might take me a few years, but I will prove to you that these are the things I do not laugh about."  "Prove it now-by answering one question: Why don't you practice what you preach?"  "Are you sure that I don't?"  "If the things you said are true, if you have the greatness to know it, you should have been the leading industrialist of the world by now."  Francisco said gravely, as he had said to the portly man, but with an odd note of gentleness in his voice, "I suggest that you think twice, Mr. Rearden."  "I've thought about you more than I care to admit. I have found no answer."  "Let me give you a hint: If the things I said are true, who is the guiltiest man in this room tonight?"  "I suppose-James Taggart?"  "No, Mr. Rearden, it is not James Taggart. But you must define the guilt and choose the man yourself."  "A few years ago, I would have said that it's you. I still think that that's what I ought to say. But I'm almost in the position of that fool woman who spoke to you: every reason I know tells me that you're guilty-and yet I can't feel it."  "You are making the same mistake as that woman, Mr. Rearden, though in a nobler form."  "What do you mean?"  "I mean much more than just your judgment of me. That woman and all those like her keep evading the thoughts which they know to be good. You keep pushing out of your mind the thoughts which you believe to be evil. They do it, because they want to avoid effort. You do it, because you won't permit yourself to consider anything that would spare you. They indulge their emotions at any cost. You sacrifice your emotions as the first cost of any problem. They are willing to bear nothing. You are willing to bear anything. They keep evading responsibility. You keep assuming it. But don't you see that the essential error is the same? Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires, Mr. Rearden. Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear."  "How did you know this about me?"  "I made the same mistake, once. But not for long."  "I wish-" Rearden began and stopped abruptly.  Francisco smiled. "Afraid to wish, Mr. Rearden?"  "I wish I could permit myself to like you as much as I do."  "I'd give-" Francisco stopped; inexplicably, Rearden saw the look of an emotion which he could not define, yet felt certain to be pain; he saw Francisco's first moment of hesitation. "Mr. Rearden, do you own any d'Anconia Copper stock?"  Rearden looked at him, bewildered. "No."  "Some day, you'll know what treason I'm committing right now, but . . . Don't ever buy any d'Anconia Copper stock. Don't ever deal with d'Anconia Copper in any way."  "Why?"  "When you'll learn the full reason, you'll know whether there's ever been anything-or anyone-that meant a damn to me, and . . . and how much he did mean."  Rearden frowned: he had remembered something. "I wouldn't deal with your company. Didn't you call them the men of the double standard? Aren't you one of the looters who is growing rich right now by means of directives?"  Inexplicably, the words did not hit Francisco as an insult, but cleared his face back into his look of assurance. "Did you think that it was I who wheedled those directives out of the robber-planners?"  "If not, then who did it?"  "My hitchhikers."  "Without your consent?"  "Without my knowledge."  "I'd hate to admit how much I want to believe you-but there's no way for you to prove it now."  "No? I'll prove it to you within the next fifteen minutes."  "How? The fact remains that you've profited the most from those directives."  "That's true. I've profited more than Mr. Mouch and his gang could ever imagine. After my years of work, they gave me just the chance I needed."  "Are you boasting?"  "You bet I am!" Rearden saw incredulously that Francisco's eyes had a hard, bright look, the look, not of a party hound, but of a man of action. "Mr. Rearden, do you know where most of those new aristocrats keep their hidden money? Do you know where most of the fair share vultures have invested their profits from Rearden Metal?"  "No, but-"  "In d'Anconia Copper stock. Safely out of the way and out of the country. D'Anconia Copper-an old, invulnerable company, so rich that it would last for three more generations of looting. A company managed by a decadent playboy who doesn't give a damn, who'll let them use his property in any way  they please and just continue to make money for them-automatically, as did his ancestors. Wasn't that a perfect setup for the looters, Mr. Rearden? Only-what one single point did they miss?"  Rearden was staring at him. "What are you driving at?"  Francisco laughed suddenly. "It's too bad about those profiteers on Rearden Metal. You wouldn't want them to lose the money you made for them, would you, Mr. Rearden? But accidents do happen in the world-you know what they say, man is only a helpless plaything at the mercy of nature's disasters. For instance, there was a fire at the d'Anconia ore docks in Valparaiso tomorrow morning, a fire that razed them to the ground along with half of the port structures. What time is it, Mr. Rearden? Oh, did I mix my tenses? Tomorrow afternoon, there will be a rock slide in the d'Anconia mines at Orano-no lives lost, no casualties, except the mines themselves. It will be found that the mines are done for, because they had been worked in the wrong places for months-what can you expect from a playboy's management? The great deposits of copper will be buried under tons of mountain where a Sebastian d'Anconia would not be able to reclaim them in less than three years, and a People's State will never reclaim them at all. When the stockholders begin to look into things, they will find that the mines at Campos, at San Felix, at Las Heras have been worked in exactly the same manner and have been running at a loss for over a year, only the playboy juggled the books and kept it out of the newspapers.  Shall I tell you what they will discover about the management of the d'Anconia foundries? Or of the d'Anconia ore fleet? But all these discoveries won't do the stockholders any good anyway, because the stock of d'Anconia Copper will have crashed tomorrow morning, crashed like an electric bulb against concrete, crashed like an express elevator, spattering pieces of hitchhikers all over the gutters!"  The triumphant rise of Francisco's voice merged with a matching sound: Rearden burst out laughing.  Rearden did not know how long that moment lasted or what he had felt, it had been like a blow hurling him into another kind of consciousness, then a second blow returning him to his own-all that was left, as at the awakening from a narcotic, was the feeling that he had known some immense kind of freedom, never to be matched in reality. This was like the Wyatt fire again, he thought, this was his secret danger.  He found himself backing away from Francisco d'Anconia, Francisco stood watching him intently, and looked as if he had been watching him all through that unknown length of time.  "There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden," Francisco said softly, "except one: the refusal to think."  "No," said Rearden; it was almost a whisper, he had to keep his voice down, he was afraid that he would hear himself scream it, "no . . . if this is the key to you, no, don't expect me to cheer you . . .you didn't have the strength to fight them . . . you chose the easiest, most vicious way . . . deliberate destruction . . . the destruction of an achievement you hadn't produced and couldn't match. . . ."  'That's not what you'll read in the newspapers tomorrow. There won't be any evidence of deliberate destruction. Everything happened in the normal, explicable, justifiable course of plain incompetence. Incompetence isn't supposed to be punished nowadays, is it? The boys in Buenos Aires and the boys in Santiago will probably want to hand me a subsidy, by way of consolation and reward. There's still a great part of the d'Anconia Copper Company left, though a great part of it is gone for good. Nobody will say that I've done it intentionally. You may think what you wish."  "I think you're the guiltiest man in this room," said Rearden quietly, wearily; even the fire of his anger was gone; he felt nothing but the emptiness left by the death of a great hope. "I think you're worse than anything I had supposed. . . ."  Francisco looked at him with a strange half-smile of serenity, the serenity of a victory over pain, and did not answer.  It was their silence that let them hear the voices of the two men who stood a few steps away, and they turned to look at the speakers.  The stocky, elderly man was obviously a businessman of the conscientious, unspectacular kind. His formal dress suit was of good quality, but of a cut fashionable twenty years before, with the faintest tinge of green at the seams; he had had few occasions to wear it. His shirt studs were ostentatiously too large, but it was the pathetic ostentation of an heirloom, intricate pieces of old-fashioned workmanship, that had probably come to him through four generations, like his business. His face had the expression which, these days, was the mark of an honest man: an expression of bewilderment. He was looking at his companion, trying hard-conscientiously, helplessly, hopelessly-to understand.  His companion was younger and shorter, a small man with lumpy flesh, with a chest thrust forward and the thin points of a mustache thrust up. He was saying, in a tone of patronizing boredom, "Well, I don't know. All of you are crying about rising costs, it seems to be the stock complaint nowadays, it's the usual whine of people whose profits are squeezed a little. I don't know, we'll have to see, we'll have to decide whether we'll permit you to make any profits or not."  Rearden glanced at Francisco-and saw a face that went beyond his conception of what the purity of a single purpose could do to a human countenance: it was the most merciless face one could ever be permitted to see. He had thought of himself as ruthless, but he knew that he could not match this level, naked, implacable look, dead to all feeling but justice. Whatever the rest of him-thought Rearden-the man who could experience this was a giant.  It was only a moment. Francisco turned to him, his face normal, and said very quietly, "I've changed my mind, Mr. Rearden. I'm glad that you came to this party. I want you to see this."  Then, raising his voice, Francisco said suddenly, in the gay, loose, piercing tone of a man of complete irresponsibility, "You won't grant me that loan, Mr. Rearden? It puts me on a terrible spot. I must get the money-I must raise it tonight-I must raise it before the Stock Exchange opens in the morning, because otherwise-"  He did not have to continue, because the little man with the mustache was clutching at his arm.  Rearden had never believed that a human body could change dimensions within one's sight, but he saw the man shrinking in weight, in posture, in form, as if the air were let out of his lumps, and what had been an arrogant ruler was suddenly a piece of scrap that could not be a threat to anyone.  "Is . . . is there something wrong, Senor d'Anconia? I mean, on . . . on the Stock Exchange?"  Francisco jerked his finger to his lips, with a frightened glance.  "Keep quiet," he whispered. "For God's sake, keep quiet!"  The man was shaking. "Something's . . . wrong?"  "You don't happen to own any d'Anconia Copper stock, do you?"  The man nodded, unable to speak. "Oh my, that's too bad! Well, listen, I'll tell you, if you give me your word of honor that you won't repeat it to anyone, You don't want to start a panic."  "Word of honor . . ." gasped the man.  "What you'd better do is run to your stockbroker and sell as fast as you can-because things haven't been going too well for d'Anconia Copper, I'm trying to raise some money, but if I don't succeed, you'll be lucky if you'll have ten cents on your dollar tomorrow morning-  oh my! I forgot that you can't reach your stockbroker before tomorrow morning-well, it's too bad, but-"  The man was running across the room, pushing people out of his way, like a torpedo shot into the crowd.  "Watch," said Francisco austerely, turning to Rearden.  The man was lost in the crowd, they could not see him, they could not tell to whom he was selling his secret or whether he had enough of his cunning left to make it a trade with those who held favors-but they saw the wake of his passage spreading through the room, the sudden cuts splitting the crowd, like the first few cracks, then like the accelerating branching that runs through a wall about to crumble, the streaks of emptiness slashed, not by a human touch, but by the impersonal breath of terror.  There were the voices abruptly choked off, the pools of silence, then sounds of a different nature; the rising, hysterical inflections of uselessly repeated questions, the unnatural whispers, a woman's scream, the few spaced, forced giggles of those still trying to pretend that nothing was happening.  There were spots of immobility in the motion of the crowd, like spreading blotches of paralysis; there was a sudden stillness, as if a motor had been cut off; then came the frantic, jerking, purposeless, rudderless movement of objects bumping down a hill by the blind mercy of gravitation and of every rock they hit on the way. People were running out, running to telephones, running to one another, clutching or pushing the bodies around them at random. These men, the most powerful men in the country, those who held, unanswerable to any power, the power over every man's food and every man's enjoyment of his span of years on earth-these men had become a pile of rubble, clattering in the wind of panic, the rubble left of a structure when its key pillar has been cut.  James Taggart, his face indecent in its exposure of emotions which centuries had taught men to keep hidden, rushed up to Francisco and screamed, "Is it true?"  "Why, James," said Francisco, smiling, "what's the matter? Why do you seem to be upset? Money is the root of all evil-so I just got tired of being evil."  Taggart ran toward the main exit, yelling something to Orren Boyle on the way. Boyle nodded and kept on nodding, with the eagerness and humility of an inefficient servant, then darted of in another direction. Cherryl, her wedding veil coiling like a crystal cloud upon the air, as she ran after him, caught Taggart at the door. "Jim, what's the matter?" He pushed her aside and she fell against the stomach of Paul Larkin, as Taggart rushed out.  Three persons stood immovably still, like three pillars spaced through the room, the lines of their sight cutting across the spread of the wreckage: Dagny, looking at Francisco-Francisco and Rearden, looking at each other.