CHAPTER IV ANTI-LIFE

James Taggart reached into the pocket of his dinner jacket, pulled out the first wad of paper he found, which was a hundred-dollar bill, and dropped it into the beggar's hand.  He noticed that the beggar pocketed the money in a manner as indifferent as his own. "Thanks, bud." said the beggar contemptuously, and walked away.  James Taggart remained still in the middle of the sidewalk, wondering what gave him a sense of shock and dread. It was not the man's insolence-he had not sought any gratitude, he had not been moved by pity, his gesture had been automatic and meaningless. It was that the beggar acted as if he would have been indifferent had he received a hundred dollars or a dime or, failing to find any help whatever, had seen himself dying of starvation within this night. Taggart shuddered and walked brusquely on, the shudder serving to cut off the realization that the beggar's mood matched his own.  The walls of the street around him had the stressed, unnatural clarity of a summer twilight, while an orange haze filled the channels of intersections and veiled the tiers of roofs, leaving him on a shrinking remnant of ground. The calendar in the sky seemed to stand insistently out of the haze, yellow like a page of old parchment, saying: August 5, No-he thought, in answer to things he had not named-it was not true, he felt fine, that's why he wanted to do something tonight. He could not admit to himself that his peculiar restlessness came from a desire to experience pleasure; he could not admit that the particular pleasure he wanted was that of celebration, because he could not admit what it was that he wanted to celebrate.  This had been a day of intense activity, spent on words floating as vaguely as cotton, yet achieving a purpose as precisely as an adding machine, summing up to his full satisfaction. But his purpose and the nature of his satisfaction had to be kept as carefully hidden from himself as they had been from others; and his sudden craving for pleasure was a dangerous breach.  The day had started with a small luncheon in the hotel suite of a visiting Argentinian legislator, where a few people of various nationalities had talked at leisurely length about the climate of Argentina, its soil, its resources, the needs of its people, the value of a dynamic, progressive attitude toward the future-and had mentioned, as the briefest topic of conversation, that Argentina would be declared a People's State within two weeks.  It had been followed by a few cocktails at the home of Orren Boyle, with only one unobtrusive gentleman from Argentina sitting silently in a corner, while two executives from Washington and a few friends of unspecified positions had talked about national resources, metallurgy, mineralogy, neighborly duties and the welfare of the globe-and had mentioned that a loan of four billion dollars would be granted within three weeks to the People's State of Argentina and the People's State of Chile.  It had been followed by a small cocktail party in a private room of the bar built like a cellar on the roof of a skyscraper, an informal party given by him, James Taggart, for the directors of a recently formed company, The Interneighborly Amity and Development Corporation, of which Orren Boyle was president and a slender, graceful, overactive man from Chile was treasurer, a man whose name was Senor Mario Martinez, but whom Taggart was tempted, by some resemblance of spirit, to call Senor Cuffy Meigs. Here they had talked about golf, horse races, boat races, automobiles and women. It had not been necessary to mention, since they all knew it, that the Interneighborly Amity and Development Corporation had an exclusive contract to operate, on a twenty-year "managerial lease", all the industrial properties of the People's States of the Southern Hemisphere.  The last event of the day had been a large dinner reception at the home of Senor Rodrigo Gonzales, a diplomatic representative of Chile.  No one had heard of Senor Gonzales a year ago, but he had become famous for the parties he had given in the past six months, ever since his arrival in New York. His guests described him as a progressive businessman. He had lost his property-it was said-when Chile, becoming a People's State, had nationalized all properties, except those belonging to citizens of backward, non-People's countries, such as Argentina; but he had adopted an enlightened attitude and had joined the new regime, placing himself in the service of his country. His home in New York occupied an entire floor of an exclusive residential hotel.  He had a fat, blank face and the eyes of a killer. Watching him at tonight's reception, Taggart had concluded that the man was impervious to any sort of feeling, he looked as if a knife could slash, unnoticed, through his pendulous layers of flesh-except that there was a lewd, almost sexual relish in the way he rubbed his feet against the rich pile of his Persian rugs, or patted the polished arm of his chair, or folded his lips about a cigar. His wife, the Senora Gonzales, was a small, attractive woman, not as beautiful as she assumed, but enjoying the reputation of a beauty by means of a violent nervous energy and an odd manner of loose, warm, cynical self-assertiveness that seemed to promise anything and to absolve anyone. It was known that her particular brand of trading was her husband's chief asset, in an age when one traded, not goods, but favors-and, watching her among the guests, Taggart had found amusement in wondering what deals had been made, what directives issued, what industries destroyed in exchange for a few chance nights, which most of those men had had no reason to seek and, perhaps, could no longer remember. The party had bored him, there had been only half a dozen persons for whose sake he had put in an appearance, and it had not been necessary to speak to that half-dozen, merely to be seen and to exchange a few glances. Dinner had been about to be served, when he had heard what he had come to hear: Senor Gonzales had mentioned-the smoke of his cigar weaving over the half-dozen men who had drifted toward his armchair-that by agreement with the future People's State of Argentina, the properties of d'Anconia Copper would be nationalized by the People's State of Chile, in less than a month, on September 2.  It had all gone as Taggart had expected; the unexpected had come when, on hearing those words, he had felt an irresistible urge to escape. He had felt incapable of enduring the boredom of the dinner, as if some other form of activity were needed to greet the achievement of this night. He had walked out into the summer twilight of the streets, feeling as if he were both pursuing and pursued: pursuing a pleasure which nothing could give him, in celebration of a feeling which he dared not name-pursued by the dread of discovering what motive had moved him through the planning of tonight's achievement and what aspect of it now gave him this feverish sense of gratification.  He reminded himself that he would sell his d'Anconia Copper stock, which had never rallied fully after its crash of last year, and he would purchase shares of the Inter-neighborly Amity and Development Corporation, as agreed with his friends, which would bring him a fortune. But the thought brought him nothing but boredom; this was not the thing he wanted to celebrate.  He tried to force himself to enjoy it: money, he thought, had been his motive, money, nothing worse. Wasn't that a normal motive? A valid one? Wasn't that what they all were after, the Wyatts, the Reardens, the d'Anconias? . . . He jerked his head to stop it: he felt as if his thoughts were slipping down a dangerous blind alley, the end of which he must never permit himself to see.  No-he thought bleakly, in reluctant admission-money meant nothing to him any longer. He had thrown dollars about by the hundreds-at that party he had given today-for unfinished drinks, for uneaten delicacies, for unprovoked tips and unexpected whims, for a long distance phone call to Argentina because one of the guests had wanted to check the exact version of a smutty story he had started telling, for the spur of any moment, for the clammy stupor of knowing that it was easier to pay than to think.  "You've got nothing to worry about, under that Railroad Unification Plan," Orren Boyle had giggled to him drunkenly. Under the Railroad Unification Plan, a local railroad had gone bankrupt in North Dakota, abandoning the region to the fate of a blighted area, the local banker had committed suicide, first killing his wife and children-a freight train had been taken off the schedule in Tennessee, leaving a local factory without transportation at a day's notice, the factory owner's son had quit college and was now in jail, awaiting execution for a murder committed with a gang of raiders-a way station had been closed in Kansas, and the station agent, who had wanted to be a scientist, had given up his studies and become a dishwasher-that he, James Taggart, might sit in a private barroom and pay for the alcohol pouring down Orren Boyle's throat, for the waiter who sponged Boyle's garments when he spilled his drink over his chest, for the carpet burned by the cigarettes of an ex-pimp from Chile who did not want to take the trouble of reaching for an ashtray across a distance of three feet.  It was not the knowledge of his indifference to money that now gave him a shudder of dread. It was the knowledge that he would be equally indifferent, were he reduced to the state of the beggar. There had been a time when he had felt some measure of guilt-in no clearer a form than a touch of irritation-at the thought that he shared the sin of greed, which he spent his time denouncing. Now he was hit by the chill realization that, in fact, he had never been a hypocrite: in full truth, he had never cared for money. This left another hole gaping open before him, leading into another blind alley which he could not risk seeing.  I just want to do something tonight!-he cried soundlessly to someone at large, in protest and in demanding anger-in protest against whatever it was that kept forcing these thoughts into his mind-in anger at a universe where some malevolent power would not permit him to find enjoyment without the need to know what he wanted or why.  What do you want?-some enemy voice kept asking, and he walked faster, trying to escape it. It seemed to him that his brain was a maze where a blind alley opened at every turn, leading into a fog that hid an abyss. It seemed to him that he was running, while the small island of safety was shrinking and nothing but those alleys would soon be left. It was like the remnant of clarity in the street around him, with the haze rolling in to fill all exits. Why did it have to shrink?-he thought in panic. This was the way he had lived all his life-keeping his eyes stubbornly, safely on the immediate pavement before him, craftily avoiding the sight of his road, of corners, of distances, of pinnacles. He had never intended going anywhere, he had wanted to be free of progression, free of the yoke of a straight line, he had never wanted his years to add up to any sum-what had summed them up?-why had he reached some unchosen destination where one could no longer stand still or retreat? "Look where you're going, brother!" snarled some voice, while an elbow pushed him back-and he realized that he had collided with some large, ill-smelling figure and that he had been running.  He slowed his steps and admitted into his mind a recognition of the streets he had chosen in his random escape. He had not wanted to know that he was going home to his wife. That, too, was a fogbound alley, but there was no other left to him.  He knew-the moment he saw Cherryl's silent, poised figure as she rose at his entrance into her room-that this was more dangerous than he had allowed himself to know and that he would not find what he wanted. But danger, to him, was a signal to shut off his sight, suspend his judgment and pursue an unaltered course, on the unstated premise that the danger would remain unreal by the sovereign power of his wish not to see it-like a foghorn within him, blowing, not to sound a warning, but to summon the fog.  "Why, yes, I did have an important business banquet to attend, but I changed my mind, I felt like having dinner with you tonight," he said in the tone of a compliment-but a quiet "I see" was the only answer he obtained.  He felt irritation at her unastonished manner and her pale, unrevealing face. He felt irritation at the smooth efficiency with which she gave instructions to the servants, then at finding himself in the candlelight of the dining room, facing her across a perfectly appointed table, with two crystal cups of fruit in silver bowls of ice between them.  It was her poise that irritated him most; she was no longer an incongruous little freak, dwarfed by the luxury of the residence which a famous artist had designed; she matched it. She sat at the table as if she were the kind of hostess that room had the right to demand. She wore a tailored housecoat of russet-colored brocade that blended with the bronze of her hair, the severe simplicity of its lines serving as her only ornament. He would have preferred the jingling bracelets and rhinestone buckles of her past. Her eyes disturbed him, as they had for months: they were neither friendly nor hostile, but watchful and questioning.  "I closed a big deal today," he said, his tone part boastful, part pleading. "A deal involving this whole continent and half a dozen governments."  He realized that the awe, the admiration, the eager curiosity he had expected, belonged to the face of the little shop girl who had ceased to exist. He saw none of it in the face of his wife; even anger or hatred would have been preferable to her level, attentive glance; the glance was worse than accusing, it was inquiring.  "What deal, Jim?"  "What do you mean, what deal? Why are you suspicious? Why do you have to start prying at once?"  "I'm sorry. I didn't know it was confidential. You don't have to answer me."  "It's not confidential." He waited, but she remained silent. "Well? Aren't you going to say anything?"  "Why, no." She said it simply, as if to please him.  "So you're not interested at all?"  "But I thought you didn't want to discuss it."  "Oh, don't be so tricky!" he snapped. "It's a big business deal. That's what you admire, isn't it, big business? Well, it's bigger than anything those boys ever dreamed of. They spend their lives grubbing for their fortunes penny by penny, while I can do it like that"-he snapped his fingers-"just like that. It's the biggest single stunt ever pulled."  "Stunt, Jim?"  "Deal!"  "And you did it? Yourself?"  "You bet I did it! That fat fool, Orren Boyle, couldn't have swung it in a million years. This took knowledge and skill and timing"-he saw a spark of interest in her eyes-"and psychology." The spark vanished, but he went rushing heedlessly on. "One had to know how to approach Wesley, and how to keep the wrong influences away from him, and how to get Mr. Thompson interested without letting him know too much, and how to cut Chick Morrison in on it, but keep Tinky Holloway out, and how to get the right people to give a few parties for Wesley at the right time, and . . . Say, Cherryl, is there any champagne in this house?"  "Champagne?"  "Can't we do something special tonight? Can't we have a sort of celebration together?"  "We can have champagne, yes, Jim, of course."  She rang the bell and gave the orders, in her odd, lifeless, uncritical manner, a manner of meticulous compliance with his wishes while volunteering none of her own.  "You don't seem to be very impressed," he said. "But what would you know about business, anyway? You wouldn't be able to understand anything on so large a scale. Wait till September second. Wait till they hear about it."  "They? Who?"  He glanced at her, as if he had let a dangerous word slip out involuntarily, "We've organized a setup where we-me, Orren and a few friends-are going to control every industrial property south of the border."  "Whose property?"  "Why . . . the people's. This is not an old-fashioned grab for private profit. It's a deal with a mission-a worthy, public-spirited mission-to manage the nationalized properties of the various People's States of South America, to teach their workers our modern techniques of production, to help the underprivileged who've never had a chance, to-" He broke off abruptly, though she had merely sat looking at him without shifting her glance. "You know," he said suddenly, with a cold little chuckle, "if you're so damn anxious to hide that you came from the slums, you ought to be less indifferent to the philosophy of social welfare. It's always the poor who lack humanitarian instincts. One has to be born to wealth in order to know the finer feelings of altruism."  "I've never tried to hide that I came from the slums," she said in the simple, impersonal tone of a factual correction. "And I haven't any sympathy for that welfare philosophy. I've seen enough of them to know what makes the kind of poor who want something for nothing." He did not answer, and she added suddenly, her voice astonished, but firm, as if in final confirmation of a long-standing doubt, "Jim, you don't care about it, either. You don't care about any of that welfare hogwash."  "Well, if money is all that you're interested in," he snapped, "let me tell you that that deal will bring me a fortune. That's what you've always admired, isn't it, wealth?"  "It depends."  "I think I'll end up as one of the richest men in the world," he said; he did not ask what her admiration depended upon. "There's nothing I won't be able to afford. Nothing. Just name it. I can give you anything you want. Go on, name it."  "I don't want anything, Jim."  "But I'd like to give you a present! To celebrate the occasion, see? Anything you take it into your head to ask. Anything. I can do it. I want to show you that I can do it. Any fancy you care to name."  "I haven't any fancies."  "Oh, come on! Want a yacht?"  "No."  "Want me to buy you the whole neighborhood where you lived in Buffalo?"  "No."  "Want the crown jewels of the People's State of England? They can be had, you know. That People's State has been hinting about it on the black market for a long time. But there aren't any old-fashioned tycoons left who're able to afford it. I'm able to afford it-or will be, after September second. Want it?"  "No."  "Then what do you want?"  "I don't want anything, Jim."  "But you've got to! You've got to want something, damn you!"  She looked at him, faintly startled, but otherwise indifferent.  "Oh, all right, I'm sorry," he said; he seemed astonished by his own outbreak. "I just wanted to please you," he added sullenly, "but I guess you can't understand it at all. You don't know how important it is. You don't know how big a man you're married to."  "I'm trying to find out," she said slowly, "Do you still think, as you used to, that Hank Rearden is a great man?"  "Yes, Jim, I do."  "Well, I've got him beaten. I'm greater than any of them, greater than Rearden and greater than that other lover of my sister's, who-"  He stopped, as if he had slid too far.  "Jim," she asked evenly, "what is going to happen on September second?"  He glanced up at her, from under his forehead-a cold glance, while his muscles creased into a semi-smile, as if in cynical breach of some hallowed restraint. "They're going to nationalize d'Anconia Copper," he said.  He heard the long, harsh roll of a motor, as a plane went by somewhere in the darkness above the roof, then a thin tinkle, as a piece of ice settled, melting, in the silver bowl of his fruit cup-before she answered. She said, "He was your friend, wasn't he?"  "Oh, shut up!"  He remained silent, not looking at her. When his eyes came back to her face, she was still watching him and she spoke first, her voice oddly stern: "What your sister did in her radio broadcast was great."  "Yes, I know, I know, you've been saying that for a month."  "You've never answered me."  "What is there to ans . . . ?"  "Just as your friends in Washington have never answered her." He remained silent. "Jim, I'm not dropping the subject." He did not answer.  "Your friends in Washington never uttered a word about it. They did not deny the things she said, they did not explain, they did not try to justify themselves. They acted as if she had never spoken. I think they're hoping that people will forget it. Some people will. But the rest of us know what she said and that your friends were afraid to fight her."  "That's not true! The proper action was taken and the incident is closed and I don't see why you keep bringing it up."  "What action?"  "Bertram Scudder was taken off the air, as a program not in the public interest at the present time."  "Does that answer her?"  "It closes the issue and there's nothing more to be said about it."  "About a government that works by blackmail and extortion?"  "You can't say that nothing was done. It's been publicly announced that Scudder's programs were disruptive, destructive and untrustworthy."  "Jim, I want to understand this. Scudder wasn't on her side-he was on yours. He didn't even arrange that broadcast. He was acting on orders from Washington, wasn't he?"  "I thought you didn't like Bertram Scudder."  "I didn't and I don't, but-"  "Then what do you care?"  "But he was innocent, as far as your friends were concerned, wasn't he?"  "I wish you wouldn't bother with politics. You talk like a fool."  "He was innocent, wasn't he?"  "So what?"  She looked at him, her eyes incredulously wide. "Then they just made him the scapegoat, didn't they?"  "Oh, don't sit there looking like Eddie Willers!"  "Do I? I like Eddie Willers. He's honest."  "He's a damn half-wit who doesn't have the faintest idea of how to deal with practical reality!"  "But you do, don't you, Jim?"  "You bet I do!"  "Then couldn't you have helped Scudder?"  "I?" He burst into helpless, angry laughter. "Oh, why don't you grow up? I did my best to get Scudder thrown to the lions! Somebody had to be. Don't you know that it was my neck, if some other hadn't been found?"  "Your neck? Why not Dagny's, if she was wrong? Because she wasn't?"  "Dagny is in an entirely different category! It had to be Scudder or me."  "Why?"  "And it's much better for national policy to let it be Scudder. This way, it's not necessary to argue about what she said-and if anybody brings it up, we start howling that it was said on Scudder's program and that Scudder's programs have been discredited and that Scudder is a proven fraud and liar, etc., etc.-and do you think the public will be able to unscramble it? Nobody's ever trusted Bertram Scudder, anyway. Oh, don't stare at me like that! Would you rather they'd picked me to discredit?"  "Why not Dagny? Because her speech could not be discredited?"  "If you're so damn sorry for Bertram Scudder, you should have seen him try his damndest to make them break my neck! He's been doing that for years-how do you think he got to where he was, except by climbing on carcasses? He thought he was pretty powerful, too-you should have seen how the big business tycoons used to be afraid of him! But he got himself outmaneuvered, this time. This time, he belonged to the wrong faction."  Dimly, through the pleasant stupor of relaxing, of sprawling back in his chair and smiling, he knew that this was the enjoyment he wanted: to be himself. To be himself-he thought, in the drugged, precarious state of floating past the deadliest of his blind alleys, the one that led to the question of what was himself.  "You see, he belonged to the Tinky Holloway faction. It was pretty much of a seesaw for a while, between the Tinky Holloway faction and the Chick Morrison faction. But we won. Tinky made a deal and agreed to scuttle his pal Bertram in exchange for a few things he needed from us. You should have heard Bertram howl! But he was a dead duck and he knew it."  He started on a rolling chuckle, but choked it off, as the haze cleared and he saw his wife's face. "Jim," she whispered, "is that the sort of . . . victories you're winning?"  "Oh, for Christ's sake!" he screamed, smashing his fist down on the table. "Where have you been all these years? What sort of world do you think you're living in?" His blow had upset his water glass and the water went spreading in dark stains over the lace of the tablecloth.  "I'm trying to find out," she whispered. Her shoulders were sagging and her face looked suddenly worn, an odd, aged look that seemed haggard and lost.  "I couldn't help it!" he burst out in the silence. "I'm not to blame! I have to take things as I find them! It's not I who've made this world!"  He was shocked to see that she smiled-a smile of so fiercely bitter a contempt that it seemed incredible on her gently patient face; she was not looking at him, but at some image of her own. "That's what my father used to say when he got drunk at the corner saloon instead of looking for work."  "How dare you try comparing me to-" he started, but did not finish, because she was not listening.  Her words, when she looked at him again, astonished him as completely irrelevant. "The date of that nationalization, September second," she asked, her voice wistful, "was it you who picked it?"  "No. I had nothing to do with it. It's the date of some special session of their legislature. Why?"  "It's the date of our first wedding anniversary."  "Oh? Oh, that's right!" He smiled, relieved at the change to a safe subject. "We'll have been married a year. My, it doesn't seem that long!"  "It seems much longer," she said tonelessly.  She was looking off again, and he felt in sudden uneasiness that the subject was not safe at all; he wished she would not look as if she were seeing the whole course of that year and of their marriage . . . not to get scared, but to learn-she thought-the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn . . . The words came from a sentence she had repeated to herself so often that it felt like a pillar polished smooth by the helpless weight of her body, the pillar that had supported her through the past year. She tried to repeat it, but she felt as if her hands were slipping on the polish, as if the sentence would not stave off terror any longer-because she was beginning to understand. If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn. . . . It was in the bewildered loneliness of the first weeks of her marriage that she said it to herself for the first time. She could not understand Jim's behavior, or his sullen anger, which looked like weakness, or his evasive, incomprehensible answers to her questions, which sounded like cowardice; such traits were not possible in the James Taggart whom she had married. She told herself that she could not condemn without understanding, that she knew nothing about his world, that the extent of her ignorance was the extent to which she misinterpreted his actions. She took the blame, she took the beating of self reproach-against some bleakly stubborn certainty which told her that something was wrong and that the thing she felt was fear.  "I must learn everything that Mrs. James Taggart is expected to know and to be." was the way she explained her purpose to a teacher of etiquette. She set out to learn with the devotion, the discipline, the drive of a military cadet or a religious novice. It was the only way, she thought, of earning the height which her husband had granted her on trust, of living up to his vision of her, which it was now her duty to achieve. And, not wishing to confess it to herself, she felt also that at the end of the long task she would recapture her vision of him, that knowledge would bring back to her the man she had seen on the night of his railroad's triumph.  She could not understand Jim's attitude when she told him about her lessons. He burst out laughing; she was unable to believe that the laughter had a sound of malicious contempt. "Why, Jim? Why? What are you laughing at?" He would not explain-almost as if the fact of his contempt were sufficient and required no reasons.  She could not suspect him of malice: he was too patiently generous about her mistakes. He seemed eager to display her in the best drawing rooms of the city, and he never uttered a word of reproach for her ignorance, for her awkwardness, for those terrible moments when a silent exchange of glances among the guests and a burst of blood to her cheekbones told her that she had said the wrong thing again. He showed no embarrassment, he merely watched her with a faint smile. When they came home after one of those evenings, his mood seemed affectionately cheerful. He was trying to make it easier for her, she thought-and gratitude drove her to study the harder. She expected her reward on the evening when, by some imperceptible transition, she found herself enjoying a party for the first time. She felt free to act, not by rules, but at her own pleasure, with sudden confidence that the rules had fused into a natural habit-she knew that she was attracting attention, but now, for the first time, it was not the attention of ridicule, but of admiration-she was sought after, on her own merit, she was Mrs. Taggart, she had ceased being an object of charity weighing Jim down, painfully tolerated for his sake-she was laughing gaily and seeing the smiles of response, of appreciation on the faces around her-and she kept glancing at him across the room, radiantly, like a child handing him a report card with a perfect score, begging him to be proud of her. Jim sat alone in a corner, watching her with an undecipherable glance.  He would not speak to her on their way home. "I don't know why I keep dragging myself to those parties," he snapped suddenly, tearing off his dress tie in the middle of their living room, "I've never sat through such a vulgar, boring waste of time!" "Why, Jim," she said, stunned, "I thought it was wonderful." "You would! You seemed to be quite at home-quite as if it were Coney Island. I wish you'd learn to keep your place and not to embarrass me in public." "I embarrassed you? Tonight?" "You did!" "How?" "If you don't understand it, I can't explain," he said in the tone of a mystic who implies that a lack of understanding is the confession of a shameful inferiority. "I don't understand it," she said firmly. He walked out of the room, slamming the door.  She felt that the inexplicable was not a mere blank, this time: it had a tinge of evil. From that night on, a small, hard point of fear remained within her, like the spot of a distant headlight advancing upon her down an invisible track.  Knowledge did not seem to bring her a clearer vision of Jim's world, but to make the mystery greater. She could not believe that she was supposed to feel respect for the dreary senselessness of the art shows which his friends attended, of the novels they read, of the political magazines they discussed-the art shows, where she saw the kind of drawings she had seen chalked on any pavement of her childhood's slums-the novels, that purported to prove the futility of science, industry, civilization and love, using language that her father would not have used in his drunkenest moments-the magazines, that propounded cowardly generalities, less clear and more stale than the sermons for which she had condemned the preacher of the slum mission as a mealy-mouthed old fraud.  She could not believe that these things were the culture she had so reverently looked up to and so eagerly waited to discover. She felt as if she had climbed a mountain toward a jagged shape that had looked like a castle and had found it to be the crumbling ruin of a gutted warehouse.  "Jim," she said once, after an evening spent among the men who were called the intellectual leaders of the country, "Dr. Simon Pritchett is a phony-a mean, scared old phony." "Now, really," he answered, "do you think you're qualified to pass judgment on philosophers?"  "I'm qualified to pass judgment on con men. I've seen enough of them to know one when I see him." "Now this is why I say that you'll never outgrow your background. If you had, you would have learned to appreciate Dr. Pritchett's philosophy." "What philosophy?" "If you don't understand it, I can't explain." She would not let him end the conversation on that favorite formula of his. "Jim," she said, "he's a phony, he and Balph Eubank and that whole gang of theirs-and I think you've been taken in by them." Instead of the anger she expected, she saw a brief flash of amusement in the lift of his eyelids. "That's what you think," he answered.  She felt an instant of terror at the first touch of a concept she had not known to be possible: What if Jim was not taken in by them? She could understand the phoniness of Dr. Pritchett, she thought-it was a racket that gave him an undeserved income; she could even admit the possibility, by now, that Jim might be a phony in his own business; what she could not hold inside her mind was the concept of Jim as a phony in a racket from which he gained nothing, an unpaid phony, an unvenal phony; the phoniness of a cardsharp or a con man seemed innocently wholesome by comparison. She could not conceive of his motive; she felt only that the headlight moving upon her had grown larger.  She could not remember by what steps, what accumulation of pain, first as small scratches of uneasiness, then as stabs of bewilderment, then as the chronic, nagging pull of fear, she had begun to doubt Jim's position on the railroad. It was his sudden, angry "so you don't trust me?" snapped in answer to her first, innocent questions that made her realize that she did not-when the doubt had not yet formed in her mind and she had fully expected that his answers would reassure her. She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted, "I don't care to talk shop," was his answer whenever she mentioned the railroad. She tried to plead with him once. "Jim, you know what I think of your work and how much I admire you for it." "Oh, really? What is it you married, a man or a railroad president?" "I . . . I never thought of separating the two." "Well, it is not very flattering to me." She looked at him, baffled: she had thought it was. "I'd like to believe," he said, "that you love me for myself, and not for my railroad." "Oh God, Jim," she gasped, "you didn't think that I-!" "No," he said, with a sadly generous smile, "I didn't think that you married me for my money or my position. I have never doubted you." Realizing, in stunned confusion and in tortured fairness, that she might have given him ground to misinterpret her feeling, that she had forgotten how many bitter disappointments he must have suffered at the hands of fortune-hunting women, she could do nothing but shake her head and moan, "Oh, Jim, that's not what I meant!" He chuckled softly, as at a child, and slipped his arm around her. "Do you love me?" he asked. "Yes," she whispered. "Then you must have faith in me. Love is faith, you know. Don't you see that I need it? I don't trust anyone around me, I have nothing but enemies, I am very lonely. Don't you know that I need you?"  The thing that made her pace her room-hours later, in tortured restlessness-was that she wished desperately to believe him and did not believe a word of it, yet knew that it was true. It was true, but not in the manner he implied, not in any manner or meaning she could ever hope to grasp. It was true that he needed her, but the nature of his need kept slipping past her every effort to define it. She did not know what he wanted of her. It was not flattery that he wanted, she had seen him listening to the obsequious compliments of liars, listening with a look of resentful inertness-almost the look of a drug addict at a dose inadequate to rouse him. But she had seen him look at her as if he were waiting for some reviving shot and, at times, as if he were begging. She had seen a flicker of life in his eyes whenever she granted him some sign of admiration-yet a burst of anger was his answer, whenever she named a reason for admiring him.  He seemed to want her to consider him great, but never dare ascribe any specific content to his greatness.  She did not understand the night, in mid-April, when he returned from a trip to Washington. "Hi, kid!" he said loudly, dropping a sheaf of lilac into her arms. "Happy days are here again! Just saw those flowers and thought of you. Spring is coming, baby!"  He poured himself a drink and paced the room, talking with too light, too brash a manner of gaiety. There was a feverish sparkle in his eyes, and his voice seemed shredded by some unnatural excitement. She began to wonder whether he was elated or crushed.  "I know what it is that they're planning!" he said suddenly, without transition, and she glanced up at him swiftly: she knew the sound of one of his inner explosions. "There's not a dozen people in the whole country who know it, but I do! The top boys are keeping it secret till they're ready to spring it on the nation. Will it surprise a lot of people! Will it knock them flat! A lot of people? Hell, every single person in this country! It will affect every single person. That's how important it is."  "Affect-how, Jim?"  "It will affect them! And they don't know what's coming, but I do. There they sit tonight"-he waved at the lighted windows of the city-"making plans, counting their money, hugging their children or their dreams, and they don't know, but I do, that all of it will be struck, stopped, changed!"  "Changed-for the worse or the better?"  "For the better, of course," he answered impatiently, as if it were irrelevant; his voice seemed to lose its fire and to slip into the fraudulent sound of duty. "It's a plan to save the country, to stop our economic decline, to hold things still, to achieve stability and security."  "What plan?"  "I can't tell you. It's secret. Top secret. You have no idea how many people would like to know it. There's no industrialist who wouldn't give a dozen of his best furnaces for just one hint of warning, which he's not going to get! Like Hank Rearden, for instance, whom you admire so much." He chuckled, looking off into the future.  "Jim," she asked, the sound of fear in her voice telling him what the sound of his chuckle had been like, "why do you hate Hank Rearden?"  "I don't hate him!" He whirled to her, and his face, incredibly, looked anxious, almost frightened. "I never said I hated him. Don't worry, he'll approve of the plan. Everybody will. It's for everybody's good." He sounded as if he were pleading. She felt the dizzying certainty that he was lying, yet that the plea was sincere-as if he had a desperate need to reassure her, but not about the things he said.  She forced herself to smile. "Yes, Jim, of course," she answered, wondering what instinct in what impossible kind of chaos had made her say it as if it were her part to reassure him.  The look she saw on his face was almost a smile and almost of gratitude. "1 had to tell you about it tonight. I had to tell you. I wanted you to know what tremendous issues I deal with. You always talk about my work, but you don't understand it at all, it's so much wider than you imagine. You think that running a railroad is a matter of track laying and fancy metals and getting trains there on time. But it's not. Any underling can do that. The real heart of a railroad is in Washington. My job is politics. Politics. Decisions made on a national scale, affecting everything, controlling everybody. A few words on paper, a directive-changing the life of every person in every nook, cranny and penthouse of this country!"  "Yes, Jim," she said, wishing to believe that he was, perhaps, a man of stature in the mysterious realm of Washington.  "You'll see," he said, pacing the room. "You think they're powerful -those giants of industry who're so clever with motors and furnaces? They'll be stopped! They'll be stripped! They'll be brought down! They'll be-" He noticed the way she was staring at him. "It's not for ourselves," he snapped hastily, "it's for the people. That's the difference between business and politics-we have no selfish ends in view, no private motives, we're not after profit, we don't spend our lives scrambling for money, we don't have to! That's why we're slandered and misunderstood by all the greedy profit-chasers who can't conceive of a spiritual motive or a moral ideal or . . . We couldn't help it!" he cried suddenly, whirling to her. "We had to have that plan! With everything falling to pieces and stopping, something had to be done! We had to stop them from stopping! We couldn't help it!"  His eyes were desperate; she did not know whether he was boasting or begging for forgiveness; she did not know whether this was triumph or terror. "Jim, don't you feel well? Maybe you've worked too hard and you're worn out and-"  "I've never felt better in my life!" he snapped, resuming his pacing. "You bet I've worked hard. My work is bigger than any job you can hope to imagine. It's above anything that grubbing mechanics like Rearden and my sister, are doing. Whatever they do, I can undo it. Let them build a track-I can come and break it, just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "Just like breaking a spine!"  "You want to break spines?" she whispered, trembling.  "I haven't said that!" he screamed. "What's the matter with you? I haven't said it!"  "I'm sorry, Jim!" she gasped, shocked by her own words and by the terror in his eyes. "It's just that I don't understand, but . . . but I know I shouldn't bother you with questions when you're so tired"-she was struggling desperately to convince herself-"when you have so many things on your mind . . . such . . . such great things . . .things I can't even begin to think of . . ."  His shoulders sagged, relaxing. He approached her and dropped wearily down on his knees, slipping his arms around her. "You poor little fool," he said affectionately.  She held onto him, moved by something that felt like tenderness and almost like pity. But he raised his head to glance up at her face, and it seemed to her that the look she saw in his eyes was part-gratification, part-contempt-almost as if, by some unknown kind of sanction, she had absolved him and damned herself.  It was useless-she found in the days that followed-to tell herself that these things were beyond her understanding, that it was her duty to believe in him, that love was faith. Her doubt kept growing-doubt of his incomprehensible work and of his relation to the railroad. She wondered why it kept growing in direct proportion to her self-admonitions that faith was the duty she owed him. Then, one sleepless night, she realized that her effort to fulfill that duty consisted of turning away whenever people discussed his job, of refusing to look at newspaper mentions of Taggart Transcontinental, of slamming her mind shut against any evidence and every contradiction. She stopped, aghast, struck by the question: What is it, then-faith versus truth? And realizing that part of her zeal to believe was her fear to know, she set out to learn the truth, with a cleaner, calmer sense of tightness than the effort at dutiful self-fraud had ever given her.  It did not take her long to learn. The evasiveness of the Taggart executives, when she asked a few casual questions, the stale generalities of their answers, the strain of their manner at the mention of their boss, and their obvious reluctance to discuss him-told her nothing concrete, but gave her a feeling equivalent to knowing the worst. The railroad workers were more specific-the switchmen, the gatemen, the ticket sellers whom she drew into chance conversations in the Taggart Terminal and who did not know her. "Jim Taggart? That whining, sniveling, speech-making deadhead!" "Jimmy the President? Well, I'll tell you: he's the hobo on the gravy train." "The boss? Mr. Taggart? You mean Miss Taggart, don't you?"  It was Eddie Willers who told her the whole truth. She heard that he had known Jim since childhood, and she asked him to lunch with her. When she faced him at the table, when she saw the earnest, questioning directness of his eyes and the severely literal simplicity of his words, she dropped all attempts at casual prodding, she told him what she wanted to know and why, briefly, impersonally, not appealing for help or for pity, only for truth. He answered her in the same manner. He told her the whole story, quietly, impersonally, pronouncing no verdict, expressing no opinion, never encroaching on her emotions by any sign of concern for them, speaking with the shining austerity and the awesome power of facts. He told her who ran Taggart Transcontinental.  He told her the story of the John Galt Line. She listened, and what she felt was not shock, but worse: the lack of shock, as if she had always known it. "Thank you, Mr. Willers," was all that she said when he finished.  She waited for Jim to come home, that evening, and the thing that eroded any pain or indignation, was a feeling of her own detachment, as if it did not matter to her any longer, as if some action were required of her, but it made no difference what the action would be or the consequences. It was not anger that she felt when she saw Jim enter the room, but a murky astonishment, almost as if she wondered who he was and why it should now be necessary to speak to him. She told him what she knew, briefly, in a tired, extinguished voice. It seemed to her that he understood it from her first few sentences, as if he had expected this to come sooner or later.  "Why didn't you tell me the truth?" she asked.  "So that's your idea of gratitude?" he screamed. "So that's how you feel after everything I've done for you? Everybody told me that crudeness and selfishness was all I could expect for lifting a cheap little alley cat by the scruff of her neck!"  She looked at him as if he were making inarticulate sounds that connected to nothing inside her mind. "Why didn't you tell me the truth?"  "Is that all the love you felt for me, you sneaky little hypocrite? Is that all I get in return for my faith in you?"  "Why did you lie? Why did you let me think what I thought?"  "You should be ashamed of yourself, you should be ashamed to face me or speak to me!"  "1?" The inarticulate sounds had connected, but she could not believe the sum they made. "What are you trying to do, Jim?" she asked, her voice incredulous and distant.  "Have you thought of my feelings? Have you thought of what this would do to my feelings? You should have considered my feelings first! That's the first obligation of any wife-and of a woman in your position in particular! There's nothing lower and uglier than ingratitude!"  For the flash of one instant, she grasped the unthinkable fact of a man who was guilty and knew it and was trying to escape by inducing an emotion of guilt in his victim. But she could not hold the fact inside her brain. She felt a stab of horror, the convulsion of a mind rejecting a sight that would destroy it-a stab like a swift recoil from the edge of insanity. By the time she dropped her head, closing her eyes, she knew only that she felt disgust, a sickening disgust for a nameless reason.  When she raised her head, it seemed to her-that she caught a glimpse of him watching her with the uncertain, retreating, calculating look of a man whose trick has not worked. But before she had time to believe it, his face was hidden again under an expression of injury and anger.  She said, as if she were naming her thoughts for the benefit of the rational being who was not present, but whose presence she had to assume, since no other could be addressed, "That night . . . those headlines . . . that glory . . . it was not you at all . . . it was Dagny."  "Shut up, you rotten little bitch!"  She looked at him blankly, without reaction. She looked as if nothing could reach her, because her dying words had been uttered.  He made the sound of a sob. "Cherryl, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, I take it back, I didn't mean it . . ."  She remained standing, leaning against the wall, as she had stood from the first.  He dropped down on the edge of a couch, in a posture of helpless dejection. "How could I have explained it to you?" he said in the tone of abandoning hope. "It's all so big and so complex. How could I have told you anything about a transcontinental railroad, unless you knew all the details and ramifications? How could I have explained to you my years of work, my . . . Oh, what's the use? I've always been misunderstood and I should have been accustomed to it by now, only I thought that you were different and that I had a chance."  "Jim, why did you marry me?"  He chuckled sadly. "That's what everybody kept asking me. I didn't think you'd ever ask it. Why? Because I love you."  She wondered at how strange it was that this word-which was supposed to be the simplest in the human language, the word understood by all, the universal bond among men-conveyed to her no meaning whatever. She did not know what it was that it named in his mind.  "Nobody's ever loved me," he said. "There isn't any love in the world. People don't feel. I feel things. Who cares about that? All they care for is time schedules and freight loads and money. I can't live among those people. I'm very lonely. I've always longed to find understanding. Maybe I'm just a hopeless idealist, looking for the impossible. Nobody will ever understand me."  "Jim," she said, with an odd little note of severity in her voice, "what I've struggled for all this time is to understand you."  He dropped his hand in a motion of brushing her words aside, not offensively, but sadly. "I thought you could. You're all I have. But maybe understanding is just not possible between human beings."  "Why should it be impossible? Why don't you tell me what it is that you want? Why don't you help me to understand you?"  He sighed. "That's it. That's the trouble-your asking all those why's. Your constant asking of a why for everything. What I'm talking about can't be put into words. It can't be named. It has to be felt. Either you feel it or you don't. It's not a thing of the mind, but of the heart. Don't you ever feel? Just feel, without asking all those questions? Can't you understand me as a human being, not as if I were a scientific object in a laboratory? The great understanding that transcends our shabby words and helpless minds . . . No, I guess I shouldn't look for it. But I'll always seek and hope. You're my last hope. You're all I have."  She stood at the wall, without moving.  "I need you," he wailed softly. "I’m all alone. You're not like the others. I believe in you. I trust you. What has all that money and fame and business and struggle given me? You're all I have . . . "  She stood without moving and the direction of her glance, lowered to look down at him, was the only form of recognition she gave him.  The things he said about his suffering were lies, she thought; but the suffering was real; he was a man torn by some continual anguish, which he seemed unable to tell her, but which, perhaps, she could learn to understand. She still owed him this much-she thought, with the grayness of a sense of duty-in payment for the position he had given her, which, perhaps, was all he had to give, she owed him an effort to understand him.  It was strange to feel, in the days that followed, that she had become a stranger to herself, a stranger who had nothing to want or to seek. In place of a love made by the brilliant fire of hero worship, she was left with the gnawing drabness of pity. In place of the men she had struggled to find, men who fought for their goals and refused to suffer-she was left with a man whose suffering was his only claim to value and his only offer in exchange for her life. But it made no difference to her any longer. The one who was she, had looked with eagerness at the turn of every corner ahead; the passive stranger who had taken her place, was like all the over groomed people around her, the people who said that they were adult because they did not try to think or to desire.  But the stranger was still haunted by a ghost who was herself, and the ghost had a mission to accomplish. She had to learn to understand the things that had destroyed her. She had to know, and she lived with a sense of ceaseless waiting. She had to know, even though she felt that the headlight was closer and in the moment of knowledge she would be struck by the wheels.  What do you want of me?-was the question that kept beating in her mind as a clue. What do you want of me?-she kept crying soundlessly, at dinner tables, in drawing rooms, on sleepless nights- crying it to Jim and those who seemed to share his secret, to Balph Eubank, to Dr. Simon Pritchett-what do you want of me? She did not ask it aloud; she knew that they would not answer. What do you want of me? -she asked, feeling as if she were running, but no way were open to escape. What do you want of me?-she asked, looking at the whole long torture of her marriage that had not lasted the full span of one year.  "What do you want of me?" she asked aloud-and saw that she was sitting at the table in her dining room, looking at Jim, at his feverish face, and at a drying stain of water on the table. She did not know how long a span of silence had stretched between them, she was startled by her own voice and by the--question she had not intended to utter. She did not expect him to understand it, he had never seemed to understand much simpler queries-and she shook her head, struggling to recapture the reality of the present.  She was startled to see him looking at her with a touch of derision, as if he were mocking her estimate of his understanding.  "Love," he answered.  She felt herself sagging with hopelessness, in the face of that answer which was at once so simple and so meaningless.  "You don't love me," he said accusingly. She did not answer. "You don't love me or you wouldn't ask such a question."  "I did love you once," she said dully, "but it wasn't what you wanted. I loved you for your courage, your ambition, your ability. But it wasn't real, any of it."  His lower lip swelled a little in a faint, contemptuous thrust. "What a shabby idea of love!" he said.  "Jim, what is it that you want to be loved for?"  "What a cheap shopkeeper's attitude!"  She did not speak; she looked at him, her eyes stretched by a silent question.  "To be loved for!" he said, his voice grating with mockery and righteousness. "So you think that love is a matter of mathematics, of exchange, of weighing and measuring, like a pound of butter on a grocery counter? I don't want to be loved for anything. I want to be loved for myself-not for anything I do or have or say or think. For myself-not for my body or mind or words or works or actions."  "But then . . . what is yourself?"  "If you loved me, you wouldn't ask it." His voice had a shrill note of nervousness, as if he were swaying dangerously between caution and some blindly heedless impulse. "You wouldn't ask. You'd know. You'd feel it. Why do you always try to tag and label everything? Can't you rise above those petty materialistic definitions? Don't you ever feel-just feel?"  "Yes. Jim, I do," she said, her voice low. "But I am trying not to, because . . . because what I feel is fear."  "Of me?" he asked hopefully.  "No, not exactly. Not fear of what you can do to me, but of what you are."  He dropped his eyelids with the swiftness of slamming a door-but she caught a flash of his eyes and the flash, incredibly, was terror.  "You're not capable of love, you cheap little gold-digger!" he cried suddenly, in a tone stripped of all color but the desire to hurt. "Yes, I said gold-digger. There are many forms of it, other than greed for money, other and worse. You're a gold-digger of the spirit. You didn't marry me for my cash-but you married me for my ability or courage or whatever value it was that you set as the price of your love!"  "Do you want . . . love . . . to be . . . causeless?"  "Love is its own cause! Love is above causes and reasons. Love is blind. But you wouldn't be capable of it. You have the mean, scheming, calculating little soul of a shopkeeper who trades but never gives!  Love is a gift-a great, free, unconditional gift that transcends and forgives everything. What's the generosity of loving a man for his virtues?  What do you give him? Nothing. It's no more than cold justice. No more than he's earned."  Her eyes were dark with the dangerous intensity of glimpsing her goal. "You want it to be unearned," she said, not in the tone of a question, but of a verdict.  "Oh, you don't understand!"  "Yes, Jim, I do. That's what you want-that's what all of you really want-not money, not material benefits, not economic security, not any of the handouts you keep demanding." She spoke in a flat monotone, as if reciting her thoughts to herself, intent upon giving the solid identity of words to the torturous shreds of chaos twisting in her mind.  "All of you welfare preachers-it's not unearned money that you're after. You want handouts, but of a different kind. I'm a gold-digger of the spirit, you said, because I look for value. Then you, the welfare preachers . . . it's the spirit that you want to loot. I never thought and nobody ever told us how it could be thought of and what it would mean-the unearned in spirit. But that is what you want. You want unearned love. You want unearned admiration. You want unearned greatness. You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything. Without . . . the necessity . . . of being."  "Shut up!" he screamed.  They looked at each other, both in terror, both feeling as if they were swaying on an edge which she could not and he would not name, both knowing that one more step would be fatal.  "What do you think you're saying?" he asked in a tone of petty anger, which sounded almost benevolent by bringing them back into the realm of the normal, into the near-wholesomeness of nothing worse than a family quarrel. "What sort of metaphysical subject are you trying to deal with?"  "I don't know . . ." she said wearily, dropping her head, as if some shape she had tried to capture had slipped once more out of her grasp. "I don't know . . . It doesn't seem possible . . ."  "You'd better not try to wade in way over your head or-" But he had to stop, because the butler entered, bringing the glittering ice bucket with the champagne ordered for celebration.  They remained silent, letting the room be filled by the sounds which centuries of men and of struggle had established as the symbol of joyous attainment: the blast of the cork, the laughing tinkle of a pale gold liquid running into two broad cups filled with the weaving reflections of candles, the whisper of bubbles rising through two crystal stems, almost demanding that everything in sight rise, too, in the same aspiration.  They remained silent, till the butler had gone. Taggart sat looking down at the bubbles, holding the stem of his glass between two limply casual fingers. Then his hand closed suddenly about the stem into an awkwardly convulsed fist and he raised it, not as one lifts a glass of champagne, but as one would lift a butcher knife.  "To Francisco d'Anconia!" he said.  She put her glass down. "No," she answered.  "Drink it!" he screamed.  "No," she answered, her voice like a drop of lead.  They held each other's glances for a moment, the light playing on the golden liquid, not reaching their faces or eyes.  "Oh, go to hell!" he cried, leaping to his feet, flinging his glass to smash on the floor and rushing out of the room.  She sat at the table, not moving, for a long time, then rose slowly and pressed the bell.  She walked to her room, her steps unnaturally even, she opened the door of a closet, she reached for a suit and a pair of shoes, she took off the housecoat, moving with cautious precision, as if her life depended on not jarring anything about or within her. She held onto a single thought: that she had to get out of this house-just get out of it for a while, if only for the next hour-and then, later, she would be able to face all that had to be faced.  The lines were blurring on the paper before her and, raising her head, Dagny realized that it had long since grown dark. She pushed the papers aside, unwilling to turn on the lamp, permitting herself the luxury of idleness and darkness. It cut her off from the city beyond the windows of her living room. The calendar in the distance said: August 5.  The month behind her had gone, leaving nothing but the blank of dead time. It had gone into the planless, thankless work of racing from emergency to emergency, of delaying the collapse of a railroad-a month like a waste pile of disconnected days, each given to averting the disaster of the moment. It had not been a sum of achievements brought into existence, but only a sum of zeros, of that which had not happened, a sum of prevented catastrophes-not a task in the service of life, but only a race against death.  There had been times when an unsummoned vision-a sight of the valley-had seemed to rise before her, not as a sudden appearance, but as a constant, hidden presence that suddenly chose to assume an insistent reality. She had faced it, through moments of blinded stillness, in a contest between an unmoving decision and an unyielding pain, a pain to be fought by acknowledgment, by saying: All right, even this.  There had been mornings when, awakening with rays of sunlight on her face, she had thought that she must hurry to Hammond's Market to get fresh eggs for breakfast; then, recapturing full consciousness, seeing the haze of New York beyond the window of her bedroom, she had felt a tearing stab, like a touch of death, the touch of rejecting reality. You knew it-she had told herself severely-you knew what it would be like when you made your choice. And dragging her body, like an unwilling weight, out of bed to face an unwelcome day, she would whisper: All right, even this.  The worst of the torture had been the moments when, walking down the street, she had caught a sudden glimpse of chestnut-gold, a glowing streak of hair among the heads of strangers, and had felt as if the city had vanished, as if nothing but the violent stillness within her were delaying the moment when she would rush to him and seize him; but that next moment had come as the sight of some meaningless face-and she had stood, not wishing to live through the following step, not wishing to generate the energy of living. She had tried to avoid such moments; she had tried to forbid herself to look; she had walked, keeping her eyes on the pavements. She had failed: by some will of their own, her eyes had kept leaping to every streak of gold.  She had kept the blinds raised on the windows of her office, remembering his promise, thinking only: If you are watching me, wherever you are . . . There were no buildings close to the height of her office, but she had looked at the distant towers, wondering which window was his observation post, wondering whether some invention of his own, some device of rays and lenses, permitted him to observe her every movement from some skyscraper a block or a mile away. She had sat at her desk, at her uncurtained windows, thinking: Just to know that you're seeing me, even if I'm never to see you again. And remembering it, now, in the darkness of her room, she leaped to her feet and snapped on the light. Then she dropped her head for an instant, smiling in mirthless amusement at herself. She wondered whether her lighted windows, in the black immensity of the city, were a flare of distress, calling for his help-or a lighthouse still protecting the rest of the world.  The doorbell rang. When she opened the door, she saw the silhouette of a girl with a faintly familiar face-and it took her a moment of startled astonishment to realize that it was Cherryl Taggart. Except for a formal exchange of greetings on a few chance encounters in the halls of the Taggart Building, they had not seen each other since the wedding.  Cherryl's face was composed and unsmiling. "Would you permit me to speak to you"-she hesitated and ended on-"Miss Taggart?"  "Of course," said Dagny gravely. "Come in."  She sensed some desperate emergency in the unnatural calm of Cherryl's manner; she became certain of it when she looked at the girl's face in the light of the living room. "Sit down," she said, but Cherryl remained standing.  "I came to pay a debt," said Cherryl, her voice solemn with the effort to permit herself no sound of emotion. "I want to apologize for the things I said to you at my wedding. There's no reason why you should forgive me, but it's my place to tell you that I know I was insulting everything I admire and defending everything I despise. I know that admitting it now, doesn't make up for it, and even coming here is only another presumption, there's no reason why you should want to hear it, so I can't even cancel the debt, I can only ask for a favor-that you let me say the things I want to say to you."  Dagny's shock of emotion, incredulous, warm and painful, was the wordless equivalent of the sentence: What a distance to travel in less than a year . . . ! She answered, the unsmiling earnestness of her voice like a hand extended in support, knowing that a smile would upset some precarious balance, "But it does make up for it, and I do want to hear it."  "I know that it was you who ran Taggart Transcontinental. It was you who built the John Galt Line. It was you who had the mind and the courage that kept all of it alive. I suppose you thought that I married Jim for his money-as what shop girl wouldn't have? But, you see, I married Jim because I . . . I thought that he was you. I thought that he was Taggart Transcontinental. Now I know that he's"-she hesitated, then went on firmly, as if not to spare herself anything-"he's some sort of vicious moocher, though I can't understand of what kind or why. When I spoke to you at my wedding, I thought that I was defending greatness and attacking its enemy . . . but it was in reverse . . . it was in such horrible, unbelievable reverse! . . . So I wanted to tell you that I know the truth . . . not so much for your sake, I have no right to presume that you'd care, but . . . but for the sake of the things I loved."  Dagny said slowly, "Of course I forgive it."  "Thank you," she whispered, and turned to go.  "Sit down."  She shook her head. "That . . . that was all, Miss Taggart."  Dagny allowed herself the first touch of a smile, no more than in the look of her eyes, as she said, "Cherryl, my name is Dagny."  Cherryl's answer was no more than a faint, tremulous crease of her mouth, as if, together, they had completed a single smile. "I . . . I didn't know whether I should-"  "We're sisters, aren't we?"  "No! Not through Jim!" It was an involuntary cry.  "No, through our own choice. Sit down, Cherryl." The girl obeyed, struggling not to show the eagerness of her acceptance, not to grasp for support, not to break. "You've had a terrible time, haven't you?"  "Yes . . . but that doesn't matter . . . that's my own problem . . . and my own fault."  "I don't think it was your own fault."  Cherryl did not answer, then said suddenly, desperately, "Look . . .what I don't want is charity."  "Jim must have told you-and it's true-that I never engage in charity."  "Yes, he did . . . But what I mean is-"  "I know what you mean."  "But there's no reason why you should have to feel concern for me . . . I didn't come here to complain and . . . and load another burden on your shoulders . . . That I happen to suffer, doesn't give me a claim on you."  "No, it doesn't. But that you value all the things I value, does."  "You mean . . . if you want to talk to me, it's not alms? Not just because you feel sorry for me?"  "I feel terribly sorry for you, Cherryl, and I'd like to help you-not because you suffer, but because you haven't deserved to suffer."  "You mean, you wouldn't be kind to anything weak or whining or rotten about me? Only to whatever you see in me that's good?"  "Of course."  Cherryl did not move her head, but she looked as if it were lifted-as if some bracing current were relaxing her features into that rare look which combines pain and dignity.  "It's not alms, Cherryl. Don't be afraid to speak to me."  "It's strange . . . You're the first person I can talk to . . . and it feels so easy . . . yet I . . . I was afraid to speak to you. I wanted to ask your forgiveness long ago . . . ever since I learned the truth, I went as far as the door of your office, but I stopped and stood there in the hall and didn't have the courage to go in. . . . I didn't intend to come here tonight. I went out only to . . . to think something over, and then, suddenly, I knew that I wanted to see you, that in the whole of the city this was the only place for me to go and the only thing still left for me to do."  "I'm glad you did."  "You know, Miss Tag-Dagny," she said softly, in wonder, "you're not as I expected you to be at all. . . . They, Jim and his friends, they said you were hard and cold and unfeeling."  "But it's true, Cherryl. I am, in the sense they mean-only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?"  "No. They never do. They only sneer at me when I ask them what they mean by anything . . . about anything. What did they mean about you?"  "Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that 'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality. He means . . . What's the matter?" she asked, seeing the abnormal intensity of the girl's face.  "It's . . . it's something I've tried so hard to understand . . . for such a long time. . . ."  "Well, observe that you never hear that accusation in defense of innocence, but always in defense of guilt. You never hear it said by a good person about those who fail to do him justice. But you always hear it said by a rotter about those who treat him as a rotter, those who don't feel any sympathy for the evil he's committed or for the pain he suffers as a consequence. Well, it's true-that is what I do not feel. But those who feel it, feel nothing for any quality of human greatness, for any person or action that deserves admiration, approval, esteem. These are the things I feel. You'll find that it's one or the other. Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence. Ask yourself which, of the two, are the unfeeling persons. And then you'll see what motive is the opposite of charity."  "What?" she whispered.  "Justice, Cherryl."  Cherryl shuddered suddenly and dropped her head. "Oh God!" she moaned. "If you knew what hell Jim has been giving me because I believed just what you said!" She raised her face in the sweep of another shudder, as if the things she had tried to control had broken through; the look in her eyes was terror. "Dagny," she whispered, "Dagny, I'm afraid of them . . . of Jim and all the others . . . not afraid of something they'll do . . . if it were that, I could escape . . .but afraid, as if there's no way out . . . afraid of what they are and . . . and that they exist."  Dagny came forward swiftly to sit on the arm of her chair and seize her shoulder in a steadying grasp. "Quiet, kid," she said. "You're wrong. You must never feel afraid of people in that way. You must never think that their existence is a reflection on yours-yet that's what you're thinking."  "Yes . . . Yes, I feel that there's no chance for me to exist, if they do . . . no chance, no room, no world I can cope with. . . . I don't want to feel it, I keep pushing it back, but it's coming closer and I know I have no place to run. . . . I can't explain what it feels like, I can't catch hold of it-and that's part of the terror, that you can't catch hold of anything-it's as if the whole world were suddenly destroyed, but not by an explosion-an explosion is something hard and solid-but destroyed by . . . by some horrible kind of softening . . .as if nothing were solid, nothing held any shape at all, and you could poke your finger through stone walls and the stone would give, like jelly, and mountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes like clouds-and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but goo."  "Cherryl . . . Cherryl, you poor kid, there have been centuries of philosophers plotting to turn the world into just that-to destroy people's minds by making them believe that that's what they're seeing. But you don't have to accept it. You don't have to see through the eyes of others, hold onto yours, stand on your own judgment, you know that what is, is-say it aloud, like the holiest of prayers, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise."  "But . . . but nothing is, any more. Jim and his friends-they're not. I don't know what I'm looking at, when I'm among them, I don't know what I'm hearing when they speak . . . it's not real, any of it, it's some ghastly sort of act that they're all going through . . . and I don't know what they're after. . . . Dagny! We've always been told that human beings have such a great power of knowledge, so much greater than animals, but I-I feel blinder than any animal right now, blinder and more helpless. An animal knows who are its friends and who are its enemies, and when to defend itself. It doesn't expect a friend to step on it or to cut its throat. It doesn't expect to be told that love is blind, that plunder is achievement, that gangsters are statesmen and that it's great to break the spine of Hank Rearden!-oh God, what am I saying?"  "I know what you're saying."  "I mean, how am I to deal with people? I mean, if nothing held firm for the length of one hour-we couldn't go on, could we? Well, I know that things are solid-but people? Dagny! They're nothing and anything, they're not beings, they're only switches, just constant switches without any shape. But I have to live among them. How am I to do it?"  "Cherryl, what you've been struggling with is the greatest problem in history, the one that has caused all of human suffering. You've understood much more than most people, who suffer and die, never knowing what killed them. I'll help you to understand. It's a big subject and a hard battle-but first, above all, don't be afraid."  The look on Cherryl's face was an odd, wistful longing, as if, seeing Dagny from a great distance, she were straining and failing to come closer, "I wish I could wish to fight," she said softly, "but I don't. I don't even want to win any longer. There's one change that I don't seem to have the strength to make. You see, I had never expected anything like my marriage to Jim, Then when it happened, I thought that life was much more wonderful than I had expected. And now to get used to the idea that life and people are much more horrible than anything I had imagined and that my marriage was not a glorious miracle, but some unspeakable kind of evil which I'm still afraid to learn fully-that is what I can't force myself to take. I can't get past it." She glanced up suddenly. "Dagny, how did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?"  "By holding to just one rule."  "Which?"  "To place nothing-nothing-above the verdict of my own mind."  "You've taken some terrible beatings . . . maybe worse than I did . . . worse than any of us. . . . What held you through it?"  "The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight."  She saw a look of astonishment, of incredulous recognition on Cherryl's face, as if the girl were struggling to recapture some sensation across a span of years. "Dagny"-her voice was a whisper-"that's . . . that's what I felt when I was a child . . . that's what I seem to remember most about myself . . . that kind of feeling . . . and I never lost it, it's there, it's always been there, but as I grew up, I thought it was something that I must hide. . . . I never had any name for it, but just now, when you said it, it struck me that that's what it was. . . . Dagny, to feel that way about your own life-is that good?"  "Cherryl, listen to me carefully: that feeling-with everything which it requires and implies-is the highest, noblest and only good on earth."  "The reason I ask is because I . . . I wouldn't have dared to think that. Somehow, people always made me feel as if they thought it was a sin . . . as if that were the thing in me which they resented and . . . and wanted to destroy."  "It's true. Some people do want to destroy it. And when you learn to understand their motive, you'll know the darkest, ugliest and only evil in the world, but you'll be safely out of its reach."  Cherryl's smile was like a feeble flicker struggling to retain its hold upon a few drops of fuel, to catch them, to flare up. "It's the first time in months," she whispered, "that I've felt as if . . . as if there's still a chance." She saw Dagny's eyes watching her with attentive concern, and she added, "I'll be all right . . . Let me get used to it-to you, to all the things you said. I think I'll come to believe it . . . to believe that it's real . . . and that Jim doesn't matter." She rose to her feet, as if trying to retain the moment of assurance.  Prompted by a sudden, causeless certainty, Dagny said sharply, "Cherryl, I don't want you to go home tonight."  "Oh no! I'm all right. I'm not afraid, that way. Not of going home."  "Didn't something happen there tonight?"  "No . . . not really . . . nothing worse than usual. It was just that I began to see things a little more clearly, that was all . . . I'm all right. I have to think, think harder than I ever did before . . . and then I'll decide what I must do. May I-" She hesitated.  "Yes?'1  "May I come back to talk to you again?"  "Of course."  "Thank you, I . . . I'm very grateful to you."  "Will you promise me that you'll come back?"  "I promise."  Dagny saw her walking off down the hall toward the elevator, saw the slump of her shoulders, then the effort that lifted them, saw the slender figure that seemed to sway then marshal all of its  strength to remain erect. She looked like a plant with a broken stem, still held together by a single fiber, struggling to heal the breach, which one more gust of wind would finish.  Through the open door of his study, James Taggart had seen Cherryl cross the anteroom and walk out of the apartment. He had slammed his door and slumped down on the davenport, with patches of spilled champagne still soaking the cloth of his trousers, as if his own discomfort were a revenge upon his wife and upon a universe that would not provide him with the celebration he had wanted.  After a while, he leaped to his feet, tore off his coat and threw it across the room. He reached for a cigarette, but snapped it in half and flung it at a painting over the fireplace.  He noticed a vase of Venetian glass-a museum piece, centuries old, with an intricate system of blue and gold arteries twisting through its transparent body. He seized it and flung it at the wall; it burst into a rain of glass as thin as a shattered light bulb.  He had bought that vase for the satisfaction of thinking of all the connoisseurs who could not afford it. Now he experienced the satisfaction of a revenge upon the centuries which had prized it-and the satisfaction of thinking that there were millions of desperate families, any one of whom could have lived for a year on the price of that vase.  He kicked off his shoes, and fell back on the davenport, letting his stocking feet dangle in mid-air.  The sound of the doorbell startled him: it seemed to match his mood.  It was the kind of brusque, demanding, impatient snap of sound he would have produced if he were now jabbing his finger at someone's doorbell.  He listened to the butler's steps, promising himself the pleasure of refusing admittance to whoever was seeking it. In a moment, he heard the knock at his door and the butler entered to announce, "Mrs.Rearden to see you, sir."  "What? . . . Oh . . . Well! Have her come in!"  He swung his feet down to the floor, but made no other concession, and waited with half a smile of alerted curiosity, choosing not to rise until a moment after Lillian had entered the room.  She wore a wine-colored dinner gown, an imitation of an Empire traveling suit, with a miniature double-breasted jacket gripping her high waistline over the long sweep of the skirt, and a small hat clinging to one ear, with a feather sweeping down to curl under her chin. She entered with a brusque, unrhythmical motion, the train of her dress and the feather of her hat swirling, then flapping against her legs and throat, like pennants signaling nervousness.  "Lillian, my dear, am I to be flattered, delighted or just plain flabbergasted?"  "Oh, don't make a fuss about it! I had to see you, and it had to be immediately, that's all."  The impatient tone, the peremptory movement with which she sat down were a confession of weakness: by the rules of their unwritten language, one did not assume a demanding manner unless one were seeking a favor and had no value-no threat-to barter.  "Why didn't you stay at the Gonzales reception?" she asked, her casual smile failing to hide the tone of irritation. "I dropped in on them after dinner, just to catch hold of you-but they said you hadn't been feeling well and had gone home."  He crossed the room and picked up a cigarette, for the pleasure of padding in his stocking feet past the formal elegance of her costume.  "I was bored," he answered.  "I can't stand them," she said, with a little shudder; he glanced at her in astonishment: the words sounded involuntary and sincere. "I can't stand Senor Gonzales and that whore he's got himself for a wife. It's disgusting that they've become so fashionable, they and their parties. I don't feel like going anywhere any longer. It's not the same style any more, not the same spirit. I haven't run into Balph  Eubank for months, or Dr. Pritchett, or any of the boys. And all those new faces that look like butcher's assistants! After all, our crowd were gentlemen."  "Yeah," he said reflectively. "Yeah, there's some funny kind of difference. It's like on the railroad, too: I could get along with Clem Weatherby, he was civilized, but Cuffy Meigs-that's something else again, that's . . ." He stopped abruptly.  "It's perfectly preposterous," she said, in the tone of a challenge to the space at large. "They can't get away with it."  She did not explain "who" or "with what." He knew what she meant. Through a moment of silence, they looked as if they were clinging to each other for reassurance.  In the next moment, he was thinking with pleasurable amusement that Lillian was beginning to show her age. The deep burgundy color of her gown was unbecoming, it seemed to draw a purplish tinge out of her skin, a tinge that gathered, like twilight, in the small gullies of her face, softening her flesh to a texture of tired slackness, changing her look of bright mockery into a look of stale malice.  He saw her studying him, smiling and saying crisply, with the smile as license for insult, "You are unwell, aren't you, Jim? You look like a disorganized stable boy."  He chuckled. "I can afford it."  "I know it, darling. You're one of the most powerful men in New York City." She added, "It's a good joke on New York City."  "It is."  "I concede that you're in a position to do anything. That's why I had to see you." She added a small, grunt like sound of amusement, to dilute her statement's frankness.  "Good," he said, his voice comfortable and noncommittal.  "I had to come here, because I thought it best, in this particular matter, not to be seen together in public."  "That is always wise."  "I seem to remember having been useful to you in the past."  "In the past-yes."  "I am sure that I can count on you."  "Of course-only isn't that an old-fashioned, unphilosophical remark? How can we ever be sure of anything?"  "Jim," she snapped suddenly, "you've got to help me!"  "My dear, I'm at your disposal, I'd do anything to help you," he answered, the rules of their language requiring that any open statement be answered by a blatant lie. Lillian was slipping, he thought-and he experienced the pleasure of dealing with an inadequate adversary.  She was neglecting, he noted, even the perfection of her particular trademark: her grooming. A few strands were escaping from the drilled waves of her hair-her nails, matching her gown, were the deep shade of coagulated blood, which made it easy to notice the chipped polish at their tips-and against the broad, smooth, creamy expanse of her skin in the low, square cut of her gown, he observed the tiny glitter of a safety pin holding the strap of her slip.  "You've got to prevent it!" she said, in the belligerent tone of a plea disguised as a command. "You've got to stop it!"  "Really? What?"  "My divorce."  "Oh . . . !" His features dropped into sudden earnestness.  "You know that he's going to divorce me, don't you?"  "I've heard some rumors about it."  "It's set for next month. And when I say set, that's just what I mean. Oh, it's cost him plenty-but he's bought the judge, the clerks, the bailiffs, their backers, their backers backers, a few legislators, half a dozen administrators-he's bought the whole legal process, like a private thoroughfare, and there's no single crossroad left for me to squeeze through to stop it!"  "I see."  "You know, of course, what made him start divorce proceedings?"  "I can guess."  "And I did it as a favor to you!" Her voice was growing anxiously shrill. "I told you about your sister in order to let you get that Gift Certificate for your friends, which-"  "I swear I don't know who let it out!" he cried hastily. "Only a very few at the top knew that you'd been our informer, and I'm sure nobody would dare mention-"  "Oh, I'm sure nobody did. He'd have the brains to guess it, wouldn't he?"  "Yes, I suppose so. Well, then you knew that you were taking a chance."  "I didn't think he'd go that far. I didn't think he'd ever divorce me. I didn't-"  He chuckled suddenly, with a glance of astonishing perceptiveness.  "You didn't think that guilt is a rope that wears thin, did you, Lillian?"  She looked at him, startled, then answered stonily, "I don't think it does."  "It does, my dear-for men such as your husband."  "I don't want him to divorce me!" It was a sudden scream. "I don't want to let him go free! I won't permit it! I won't let the whole of my life be a total failure!" She stopped abruptly, as if she had admitted too much.  He was chuckling softly, nodding his head with a slow movement that had an air of intelligence, almost of dignity, by signifying a complete understanding.  "I mean . . . after all, he's my husband," she said defensively.  "Yes, Lillian, yes, I know."  "Do you know what he's planning? He's going to get the decree and he's going to cut me off without a penny-no settlement, no alimony, nothing! He's going to have the last word. Don't you see? If he gets away with it, then . . . then the Gift Certificate was no victory for me at all!"  "Yes, my dear, I see."  "And besides . . . It's preposterous that I should have to think of it, but what am I going to live on? The little money I had of my own is worth nothing nowadays. It's mainly stock in factories of my father's time, that have closed long ago. What am I going to do?"  "But, Lillian," he said softly, "I thought you had no concern for money or for any material rewards."  "You don't understand! I'm not talking about money-I'm talking about poverty! Real, stinking, hall-bedroom poverty! That's out of bounds for any civilized person! I-I to have to worry about food and rent?"  He was watching her with a faint smile; for once, his soft, aging face seemed tightened into a look of wisdom; he was discovering the pleasure of full perception-in a reality which he could permit himself to perceive.  "Jim, you've got to help me! My lawyer is powerless. I've spent the little I had, on him and on his investigators, friends and fixers-but all they could do for me was find out that they can do nothing. My lawyer gave me his final report this afternoon. He told me bluntly that I haven't a chance. I don't seem to know anyone who can help against a setup of this kind. I had counted on Bertram Scudder, but . . . well, you know what happened to Bertram. And that, too, was because I had tried to help you. You pulled yourself out of that one. Jim, you're the only person who can pull me out now. You've got your gopher-hole pipe line straight up to the top. You can reach the big boys. Slip a word to your friends to slip a word to their friends. One word from Wesley would do it. Have them order that divorce decree to be refused. Just have it be refused."  He shook his head slowly, almost compassionately, like a tired professional at an overzealous amateur. "It can't be done, Lillian," he said firmly. "I'd like to do it-for the same reasons as yours-and I think you know it. But whatever power I have is not enough in this case."  She was looking at him, her eyes dark with an odd, lifeless stillness; when she spoke, the motion of her lips was twisted by so evil a contempt that he did not dare identify it beyond knowing that it embraced them both; she said, "I know that you'd like to do it."  He felt no desire to pretend; oddly, for the first time, for this one chance, truth seemed much more pleasurable-truth, for once, serving his particular kind of enjoyment. "I think you know that it can't be done," he said. "Nobody does favors nowadays, if there's nothing to gain in return. And the stakes are getting higher and higher. The gopher holes, as you called them, are so complex, so twisted and intertwisted that everybody has something on everybody else, and nobody dares move because he can't tell who'll crack which way or when. So he'll move only when he has to, when the stakes are life or death-and that's practically the only kind of stakes we're playing for now. Well, what's your private life to any of those boys? That you'd like to hold your husband-what's in it for them, one way or another? And my personal stock-in-trade-well, there's nothing I could offer them at the moment in exchange for trying to blast a whole court clique out of a highly profitable deal. Besides, right now, the top boys wouldn't do it at any price. They have to be mighty careful of your husband-he's the man who's safe from them right now-ever since that radio broadcast of my sister's."  "You asked me to force her to speak on that broadcast!"  "I know, Lillian. We lost, both of us, that time. And we lose, both of us, now."  "Yes," she said, with the same darkness of contempt in her eyes, "both of us."  It was the contempt that pleased him; it was the strange, heedless, unfamiliar pleasure of knowing that this woman saw him as he was, yet remained held by his presence, remained and leaned back in her chair, as if declaring her bondage.  "You're a wonderful person, Jim," she said. It had the sound of damnation. Yet it was a tribute, and she meant it as such, and his pleasure came from the knowledge that they were in a realm where damnation was value.  "You know," he said suddenly, "you're wrong about those butcher's assistants, like Gonzales. They have their uses. Have you ever liked Francisco d'Anconia?"  "I can't stand him."  "Well, do you know the real purpose of that cocktail-swilling occasion staged by Senor Gonzales tonight? It was to celebrate the agreement to nationalize d'Anconia Copper in about a month."  She looked at him for a moment, the corners of her lips lifting slowly into a smile. "He was your friend, wasn't he?"  Her voice had a tone he had never earned before, the tone of an emotion which he had drawn from people only by fraud, but which now, for the first time, was granted with full awareness to the real, the actual nature of his deed: a tone of admiration. Suddenly, he knew that this was the goal of his restless hours, this was the pleasure he had despaired of finding, this was the celebration he had wanted.  "Let's have a drink, Lil." he said.  Pouring the liquor, he glanced at her across the room, as she lay stretched limply in her chair. "Let him get his divorce," he said, "He won't have the last word. They will. The butcher's assistants. Senor Gonzales and Cuffy Meigs."  She did not answer. When he approached, she took the glass from him with a sloppily indifferent sweep of her hand. She drank, not in the manner of a social gesture, but like a lonely drinker in a saloon-for the physical sake of the liquor.  He sat down on the arm of the davenport, improperly close to her, and sipped his drink, watching her face. After a while, he asked, "What does he think of me?"  The question did not seem to astonish her. "He thinks you're a fool," she answered. "He thinks life's too short to have to notice your existence."  "He'd notice it, if-" He stopped.  "-if you bashed him over the head with a club? I'm not too sure. He'd merely blame himself for not having moved out of the club's reach. Still, that would be your only chance."  She shifted her body, sliding lower in the armchair, stomach forward, as if relaxation were ugliness, as if she were granting him the kind of intimacy that required no poise and no respect.  "That was the first thing I noticed about him," she said, "when I met him for the first time: that he was not afraid. He looked as if he felt certain that there was nothing any of us could do to him-so certain that he didn't even know the issue or the nature of what he felt."  "How long since you saw him last?"  "Three months. I haven't seen him since . . . since the Gift Certificate . . ."  "I saw him at an industrial meeting two weeks ago. He still looks that way-only more so. Now, he looks as if he knows it." He added, "You have failed, Lillian."  She did not answer. She pushed her hat off with the back of her hand; it rolled down to the carpet, its feather curling like a question mark. "I remember the first time I saw his mills," she said. "His mills! You can't imagine what he felt about them. You wouldn't know the kind of intellectual arrogance it takes to feel as if anything pertaining to him, anything he touched, were made sacred by the touch. His mills, his Metal, his money, his bed, his wife!" She glanced up at him, a small flicker piercing the lethargic emptiness of her eyes. "He never noticed your existence. He did notice mine. I'm still Mrs. Rearden-at least for another month."  "Yes . . ." he said, looking down at her with a sudden, new interest.  "Mrs. Rearden!" she chuckled. "You wouldn't know what that meant to him. No feudal lord ever felt or demanded such reverence for the title of his wife-or held it as such a symbol of honor. Of his unbending, untouchable, inviolate, stainless honor!" She waved her hand in a vague motion, indicating the length of her sprawled body. "Caesar's wife!" she chuckled. "Do you remember what she was supposed to be? No, you wouldn't. She was supposed to be above reproach."  He was staring down at her with the heavy, blind stare of impotent hatred-a hatred of which she was the sudden symbol, not the object.  "He didn't like it when his Metal was thrown into common, public use, for any chance passer-by to make . . . did he?"  "No, he didn't."  His words were blurring a little, as if weighted with drops of the liquor he had swallowed: "Don't tell me that you helped us to get that Gift Certificate as a favor to me and that you gained nothing. . . . I know why you did it."  "You knew it at the time."  "Sure. That's why I like you, Lillian."  His eyes kept coming back to the low cut of her gown. It was not the smooth skin that attracted his glance, not the exposed rise of her breasts, but the fraud of the safety pin beyond the edge.  "I'd like to see him beaten," he said. "I'd like to hear him scream with pain, just once."  "You won't, Jimmy."  "Why does he think he's better than the rest of us-he and that sister of mine?"  She chuckled, He rose as if she had slapped him. He went to the bar and poured himself another drink, not offering to refill her glass.  She was speaking into space, staring past him. "He did notice my existence-even though I can't lay railroad tracks for him and erect bridges to the glory of his Metal. I can't build his mills-but I can destroy them. I can't produce his Metal-but I can take it away from him. I can't bring men down to their knees in admiration-but I can bring them down to their knees."  "Shut up!" he screamed in terror, as if she were coming too close to that fogbound alley which had to remain unseen.  She glanced up at his face. "You're such a coward, Jim."  "Why don't you get drunk?" he snapped, sticking his unfinished drink at her mouth, as if he wanted to strike her.  Her fingers half-closed limply about the glass, and she drank, spilling the liquor down her chin, her breast and her gown.  "Oh hell, Lillian, you're a mess!" he said and, not troubling to reach for his handkerchief, he stretched out his hand to wipe the liquor with the flat of his palm. His fingers slipped under the gown's neckline, closing over her breast, his breath catching in a sudden gulp, like a hiccough. His eyelids were drawing closed, but he caught a glimpse of her face leaning back unresistingly, her mouth swollen with revulsion.  When he reached for her mouth, her arms embraced him obediently and her mouth responded, but the response was just a pressure, not a kiss. He raised his head to glance at her face. Her teeth were bared in a smile, but she was staring past him, as if mocking some invisible presence, her smile lifeless, yet loud with malice, like the grin of a fleshless skull.  He jerked her closer, to stifle the sight and his own shudder. His hands were going through the automatic motions of intimacy-and she complied, but in a manner that made him feel as if the beats of her arteries under his touch were snickering giggles. They were both performing an expected routine, a routine invented by someone and imposed upon them, performing it in mockery, in hatred, in defiling parody on its inventors.  He felt a sightless, heedless fury, part-horror, part-pleasure-the horror of committing an act he would never dare confess to anyone-the pleasure of committing it in blasphemous defiance of those to whom he would not dare confess it. He was himself!-the only conscious part of his rage seemed to be screaming to him-he was, at last, himself!  They did not speak. They knew each other's motive. Only two words were pronounced between them. "Mrs. Rearden," he said.  They did not look at each other when he pushed her into his bedroom and onto his bed, falling against her body, as against a soft stuffed object. Their faces had a look of secrecy, the look of partners in guilt, the furtive, smutty look of children defiling someone's clean fence by chalking sneaky scratches intended as symbols of obscenity.  Afterward, it did not disappoint him that what he had possessed was an inanimate body without resistance or response. It was not a woman that he had wanted to possess. It was not an act in celebration of life that he had wanted to perform-but an act in celebration of the triumph of impotence.  Cherryl unlocked the door and slipped in quietly, almost surreptitiously, as if hoping not to be seen or to see the place which was her home. The sense of Dagny's presence-of Dagny's world-had supported her on her way back, but when she entered her own apartment the walls seemed to swallow her again into the suffocation of a trap.  The apartment was silent; a wedge of light cut across the anteroom from a door left half-open. She dragged herself mechanically in the direction of her room. Then she stopped. The open band of light was the door of Jim's study, and on the illuminated strip of its carpet she saw a woman's hat with a feather stirring faintly in a draft.  She took a step forward. The room was empty, she saw two glasses, one on a table, the other on the floor, and a woman's purse lying on the seat of an armchair. She stood, in unexacting stupor, until she heard the muffled drawl of two voices behind the door of Jim's bedroom; she could not distinguish the words, only the quality of the sounds: Jim's voice had a tone of irritation, the woman's-of contempt.  Then she found herself in her own room, fumbling frantically to lock her door. She had been flung here by the blind panic of escape, as if it were she who had to hide, she who had to run from the ugliness of being seen in the act of seeing them-a panic made of revulsion, of pity, of embarrassment, of that mental chastity which recoils from confronting a man with the unanswerable proof of his evil.  She stood in the middle of her room, unable to grasp what action was now possible to her. Then her knees gave way, folding gently, she found herself sitting on the floor and she stayed there, staring at the carpet, shaking.  It was neither anger nor jealousy nor indignation, but the blank horror of dealing with the grotesquely senseless. It was the knowledge that neither their marriage nor his love for her nor his insistence on holding her nor his love for that other woman nor this gratuitous adultery had any meaning whatever, that there was no shred of sense in any of it and no use to grope for explanations. She had always thought of evil as purposeful, as a means to some end; what she was seeing now was evil for evil's sake.  She did not know how long she had sat there, when she heard their steps and voices, then the sound of the front door closing. She got up, with no purpose in mind, but impelled by some instinct from the past, as if acting in a vacuum where honesty was not relevant any longer, but knowing no other way to act.  She met Jim in the anteroom. For a moment, they looked at each other as if neither could believe the other's reality.  "When did you come back?" he snapped. "How long have you been home?"  "I don't know . . ."  He was looking at her face. "What's the matter with you?"  "Jim, I-" She struggled, gave up and waved her hand toward his bedroom. "Jim, I know."  "What do you know?"  "You were there . . . with a woman."  His first action was to push her into his study and slam the door, as if to hide them both, he could no longer say from whom. An unadmitted rage was boiling in his mind, struggling between escape and explosion, and it blew up into the sensation that this negligible little wife of his was depriving him of his triumph, that he would not surrender to her his new enjoyment.  "Sure!" he screamed. "So what? What are you going to do about it?"  She stared at him blankly.  "Sure! I was there with a woman! That's what I did, because that's what I felt like doing! Do you think you're going to scare me with your gasps, your stares, your whimpering virtue?" He snapped his fingers. "That for your opinion! I don't give a hoot in hell about your opinion! Take it and like it!" It was her white, defenseless face that drove him on, lashing him into a state of pleasure, the pleasure of feeling as if his words were blows disfiguring a human face. "Do you think you're going to make me hide? I'm sick of having to put on an act for your righteous satisfaction! Who the hell are you, you cheap little nobody? I'll do as I please, and you'll keep your mouth shut and go through the right tricks in public, like everybody else, and stop demanding that I act in my own home!-nobody is virtuous in his own home, the show is only for company!-but if you expect me to mean it-to mean it, you damn little fool!-you'd better grow up in a hurry!"  It was not her face that he was seeing, it was the face of the man at whom he wanted and would never be able to throw his deed of this night-but she had always stood as the worshipper, the defender, the agent of that man in his eyes, he had married her for it, so she could serve his purpose now, and he screamed, "Do you know who she was, the woman I laid? It was-"  "No!" she cried. "Jim! I don't have to know it!"  "It was Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Hank Rearden!"  She stepped back. He felt a brief flash of terror-because she was looking at him as if she were seeing that which had to remain unadmitted to himself. She asked, in a dead voice that had the incongruous sound of common sense, "I suppose you will now want us to get divorced?"  He burst out laughing. "You goddamn fool! You still mean it! You still want it big and pure! I wouldn't think of divorcing you-and don't go imagining that I'll let you divorce me! You think it's as important as that? Listen, you fool, there isn't a husband who doesn't sleep with other women and there isn't a wife who doesn't know it, but they don't talk about it! I'll lay anybody I please, and you go and do the same, like all those bitches, and keep your mouth shut!"  He saw the sudden, startling sight of a look of hard, unclouded, unfeeling, almost inhuman intelligence in her eyes. "Jim, if I were the kind who did or would, you wouldn't have married me."  "No. I wouldn't have."  "Why did you marry me?"  He felt himself drawn as by a whirlpool, part in relief that the moment of danger was past, part in irresistible defiance of the same danger. "Because you were a cheap, helpless, preposterous little guttersnipe, who'd never have a chance at anything to equal me! Because I thought you'd love me! I thought you'd know that you had to love me!"  "As you are?"  "Without daring to ask what I am! Without reasons! Without putting me on the spot always to live up to reason after reason after reason, like being on some goddamn dress parade to the end of my days!"  "You loved me . . . because I was worthless?"  "Well, what did you think you were?"  "You loved me for being rotten?"  "What else did you have to offer? But you didn't have the humility to appreciate it. I wanted to be generous, I wanted to give you security-what security is there in being loved for one's virtues? The competition's wide open, like a jungle market place, a better person will always come along to beat you! But I-I was willing to love you for your flaws, for your faults and weaknesses, for your ignorance, your crudeness, your vulgarity-and that's safe, you'd have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, you could be yourself, your real, stinking, sinful, ugly self-everybody's self is a gutter-but you could hold my love, with nothing demanded of you!"  "You wanted me to . . . accept your love . . . as alms?”  "Did you imagine that you could earn it? Did you imagine that you could deserve to marry me, you poor little tramp? I used to buy the likes of you for the price of a meal! I wanted you to know, with every step you took, with every mouthful of caviar you swallowed, that you owed it all to me, that you had nothing and were nothing and could never hope to equal, deserve or repay!"  "I . . . tried . . . to deserve it."  "Of what use would you be to me, if you had?"  "You didn't want me to?"  "Oh, you goddamn fool!"  "You didn't want me to improve? You didn't want me to rise? You thought me rotten and you wanted me to stay rotten?"  "Of what use would you be to me, if you earned it all, and I had to work to hold you, and you could trade elsewhere if you chose?"  "You wanted it to be alms . . . for both of us and from both? You wanted us to be two beggars chained to each other?"  "Yes, you goddamn evangelist! Yes, you goddamn hero worshipper! Yes!"  "You chose me because I was worthless?"  "Yes!"  "You're lying, Jim."  His answer was only a startled glance of astonishment.  "Those girls that you used to buy for the price of a meal, they would have been glad to let their real selves become a gutter, they would have taken your alms and never tried to rise, but you would not marry one of them. You married me, because you knew that I did not accept the gutter, inside or out, that I was struggling to rise and would go on struggling-didn't you?"  "Yes!" he cried.  Then the headlight she had felt rushing upon her, hit its goal-and she screamed in the bright explosion of the impact-she screamed in physical terror, backing away from him.  "What's the matter with you?" he cried, shaking, not daring to see in her eyes the thing she had seen.  She moved her hands in groping gestures, half-waving it away, half trying to grasp it; when she answered, her words did not quite name it, but they were the only words she could find: "You . . . you're a killer . . . for the sake of killing . . ."  It was too close to the unnamed; shaking with terror, he swung out blindly and struck her in the face.  She fell against the side of an armchair, her head striking the floor, but she raised her head in a moment and looked up at him blankly, without astonishment, as if physical reality were merely taking the form she had expected. A single pear-shaped drop of blood went slithering slowly from the corner of her mouth.  He stood motionless-and for a moment they looked at each other, as if neither dared to move.  She moved first. She sprang to her feet-and ran. She ran out of the room, out of the apartment-he heard her running down the hall, tearing open the iron door of the emergency stairway, not waiting to ring for the elevator.  She ran down the stairs, opening doors on random landings, running through the twisting hallways of the building, then down the stairs again, until she found herself in the lobby and ran to the street.  After a while, she saw that she was walking down a littered sidewalk in a dark neighborhood, with an electric bulb glaring in the cave of a subway entrance and a lighted billboard advertising soda crackers on the black roof of a laundry. She did not remember how she had come here. Her mind seemed to work in broken spurts, without connections. She knew only that she had to escape and that escape was impossible.  She had to escape from Jim, she thought. Where?-she asked, looking around her with a glance like a cry of prayer. She would have seized upon a job in a five-and-ten, or in that laundry, or in any of the dismal shops she passed. But she would work, she thought, and the harder she worked, the more malevolence she would draw from the people around her, and she would not know when truth would be expected of her and when a lie, but the stricter her honesty, the greater the fraud she would be asked to suffer at their hands. She had seen it before and had borne it, in the home of her family, in the shops of the slums, but she had thought that these were vicious exceptions, chance evils, to escape and forget. Now she knew that they were not exceptions, that theirs was the code accepted by the world, that it was a creed of living, known by all, but kept unnamed, leering at her from people's eyes in that sly, guilty look she had never been able to understand-and at the root of the creed, hidden by silence, lying in wait for her in the cellars of the city and in the cellars of their souls, there was a thing with which one could not live.  Why are you doing it to me?-she cried soundlessly to the darkness around her. Because you're good-some enormous laughter seemed to be answering from the roof tops and from the sewers. Then I won't want to be good any longer-But you will-I don't have to-You will- I can't bear it-You will.  She shuddered and walked faster-but ahead of her, in the foggy distance, she saw the calendar above the roofs of the city-it was long past midnight and the calendar said: August 6, but it seemed to her suddenly that she saw September 2 written above the city in letters of blood-and she thought: If she worked, if she struggled, if she rose., she would take a harder beating with each step of her climb, until, at the end, whatever she reached, be it a copper company or an unmortgaged cottage, she would see it seized by Jim on some September 2 and she would see it vanish to pay for the parties where Jim made his deals with his friends.  Then I won't!-she screamed and whirled around and went running back along the street-but it seemed to her that in the black sky grinning at her from the steam of the laundry, there weaved an enormous figure that would hold no shape, but its grin remained the same on its changing faces, and its face was Jim's and her childhood preacher's and the woman social worker's from the personnel department of the five-and-ten-and the grin seemed to say to her: People like you will always stay honest, people like you will always struggle to rise, people like you will always work, so we're safe and you have no choice.  She ran. When she looked around her once more, she was walking down a quiet street, past the glass doorways where lights were burning in the carpeted lobbies of luxurious buildings. She noticed that she was limping, and saw that the heel of her pump was loose; she had broken it somewhere in her blank span of running.  From the sudden space of a broad intersection, she looked at the great skyscrapers in the distance. They were vanishing quietly into a veil of fog, with the faint breath of a glow behind them, with a few lights like a smile of farewell. Once, they had been a promise, and from the midst of the stagnant sloth around her she had looked to them for proof that another kind of men existed. Now she knew that they were tombstones, slender obelisks soaring in memory of the men who had been destroyed for having created them, they were the frozen shape of the silent cry that the reward of achievement was martyrdom.  Somewhere in one of those vanishing towers, she thought, there was Dagny-but Dagny was a lonely victim, fighting a losing battle, to be destroyed and to sink into fog like the others.  There is no place to go, she thought and stumbled on-I can't stand still, nor move much longer-I can neither work nor rest-I can neither surrender nor fight-but this . . . this is what they want of me, this  is where they want me-neither living nor dead, neither thinking nor insane, but just a chunk of pulp that screams with fear, to be shaped by them as they please, they who have no shape of their own.  She plunged into the darkness behind a corner, shrinking in dread from any human figure. No, she thought, they're not evil, not all people . . . they're only their own first victims, but they all believe in Jim's creed, and I can't deal with them, once I know it . . . and if I spoke to them, they would try to grant me their good will, but I'd know what it is that they hold as the good and I would see death staring out of their eyes.  The sidewalk had shrunk to a broken strip, and splashes of garbage ran over from the cans at the stoops of crumbling houses. Beyond the dusty glow of a saloon, she saw a lighted sign "Young Women's Rest Club" above a locked door. She knew the institutions of that kind and the women who ran them, the women who said that theirs was the job of helping sufferers. If she went in-she thought, stumbling past-if she faced them and begged them for help, "What is your guilt?" they would ask her. "Drink? Dope? Pregnancy? Shoplifting?" She would answer, "I have no guilt, I am innocent, but I'm-" "Sorry. We have no concern for the pain of the innocent."  She ran. She stopped, regaining her eyesight, on the corner of a long, wide street. The buildings and pavements merged with the sky-and two lines of green lights hung in open space, going off into an endless distance, as if stretching into other towns and oceans and foreign lands, to encircle the earth. The green glow had a look of serenity, like an inviting, unlimited path open to confident travel. Then the lights switched to red, dropping heavily lower, turning from sharp circles into foggy smears, into a warning of unlimited danger. She stood and watched a giant truck-go by, its enormous wheels crushing one more layer of shiny polish into the flattened cobbles of the street.  The lights went back to the green of safety-but she stood trembling, unable to move. That's how it works for the travel of one's body, she thought, but what have they done to the traffic of the soul? They have set the signals in reverse-and the road is safe when the lights are the red of evil-but when the lights are the green of virtue, promising that yours is the right-of-way, you venture forth and are ground by the wheels. All over the world, she thought-those inverted lights go reaching into every land, they go on, encircling the earth. And the earth is littered with mangled cripples, who don't know what has hit them or why, who crawl as best they can on their crushed limbs through their lightless days, with no answer save that pain is the core of existence-and the traffic cops of morality chortle and tell them that man, by his nature, is unable to walk.  These were not words in her mind, these were the words which would have named, had she had the power to find them, what she knew only as a sudden fury that made her beat her fists in futile horror against the iron post of the traffic light beside her, against the hollow tube where the hoarse, rusty chuckle of a relentless mechanism went grating on and on.  She could not smash it with her fists, she could not batter one by one all the posts of the street stretching off beyond eyesight-as she could not smash that creed from the souls of the men she would encounter, one by one. She could not deal with people any longer, she could not take the paths they took-but what could she say to them, she who had no words to name the thing she knew and no voice that people would hear? What could she tell them? How could she reach them all?  Where were the men who could have spoken? These were not words in her mind, these were only the blows of: her fists against metal-then she saw herself suddenly, battering her knuckles to blood against an immovable post, and the sight made her shudder-and she stumbled away. She went on, seeing nothing around her, feeling trapped in a maze with no exit.  No exit-her shreds of awareness were saying, beating it into the pavements in the sound of her steps-no exit . . . no refuge . . . no signals . . . no way to tell destruction from safety, or enemy from friend. . . . Like that dog she had heard about, she thought . . .somebody's dog in somebody's laboratory . . . the dog who got his signals switched on him, and saw no way to tell satisfaction from torture, saw food changed to beatings and beatings to food, saw his eyes and ears deceiving him and his judgment futile and his consciousness impotent in a shifting, swimming, shapeless world-and gave up, refusing to eat at that price or to live in a world of that kind. . . . No!-was the only conscious word in her brain-no!-no!-no!-not your way, not your world-even if this "no" is all that's to be left of mine!  It was in the darkest hour of the night, in an alley among wharfs and warehouses that the social worker saw her. The social worker was a woman whose gray face and gray coat blended with the walls of the district. She saw a young girl wearing a suit too smart and expensive for the neighborhood, with no hat, no purse, with a broken heel, disheveled hair and a bruise at the corner of her mouth, a girl staggering blindly, not knowing sidewalks from pavements. The street was only a narrow crack between the sheer, blank walls of storage structures, but a ray of light fell through a fog dank with the odor of rotting water; a stone parapet ended the street on the edge of a vast black hole merging river and sky.  The social worker approached her and asked severely, "Are you in trouble?"-and saw one wary eye, the other hidden by a lock of hair, and the face of a wild creature who has forgotten the sound of human voices, but listens as to a distant echo, with suspicion, yet almost with hope.  The social worker seized her arm. "It's a disgrace to come to such a state . . . if you society girls had something to do besides indulging your desires and chasing pleasures, you wouldn't be wandering, drunk as a tramp, at this hour of the night . . . if you stopped living for your own enjoyment, stopped thinking of yourself and found some higher-"  Then the girl screamed-and the scream went beating against the blank walls of the street as in a chamber of torture, an animal scream of terror. She tore her arm loose and sprang back, then screamed in articulate sounds: "No! No! Not your kind of world!"  Then she ran, ran by the sudden propulsion of a burst of power, the power of a creature running for its life, she ran straight down the street that ended at the river-and in a single streak of speed, with no break, no moment of doubt, with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation, she kept running till the parapet barred her way and, not stopping, went over into space.