The Fountainhead

1.

GAIL WYNAND raised a gun to his temple.

He felt the pressure of a metal ring against his skin — and nothing else. He might have been holding a lead pipe or a piece of jewelry; it was just a small circle without significance. "I am going to die," he said aloud — and yawned.

He felt no relief, no despair, no fear. The moment of his end would not grant him even the dignity of seriousness. It was an anonymous moment; a few minutes ago, he had held a toothbrush in that hand; now he held a gun with the same casual indifference.

One does not die like this, he thought. One must feel a great joy or a healthy terror. One must salute one's own end. Let me feel a spasm of dread and I'll pull the trigger. He felt nothing.

He shrugged and lowered the gun. He stood tapping it against the palm of his left hand. People always speak of a black death or a red death, he thought; yours, Gail Wynand, will be a gray death. Why hasn't anyone ever said that this is the ultimate horror? Not screams, pleas or convulsions. Not the indifference of a clean emptiness, disinfected by the fire of some great disaster. But this — a mean, smutty little horror, impotent even to frighten. You can't do it like that, he told himself, smiling coldly; it would be in such bad taste.

He walked to the wall of his bedroom. His penthouse was built above the fifty-seventh floor of a great residential hotel which he owned, in the center of Manhattan; he could see the whole city below him. The bedroom was a glass cage on the roof of the penthouse, its walls and ceiling made of huge glass sheets. There were dust-blue suede curtains to be pulled across the walls and enclose the room when he wished; there was nothing to cover the ceiling. Lying in bed, he could study the stars over his head, or see flashes of lightning, or watch the rain smashed into furious, glittering sunbursts in mid-air above him, against the unseen protection. He liked to extinguish the lights and pull all the curtains open when he lay in bed with a woman. "We are fornicating in the sight of six million people," he would tell her.

He was alone now. The curtains were open. He stood looking at the city. It was late and the great riot of lights below him was beginning to die down. He thought that he did not mind having to look at the city for many more years and he did not mind never seeing it again.

He leaned against the wall and felt the cold glass through the thin, dark silk of his pyjamas. A monogram was embroidered in white on his breast pocket: GW, reproduced from his handwriting, exactly as he signed his initials with a single imperial motion.

People said that Gail Wynand's greatest deception, among many, was his appearance. He looked like the decadent, overperfected end product of a long line of exquisite breeding — and everybody knew that he came from the gutter. He was tall, too slender for physical beauty, as if all his flesh and muscle had been bred away. It was not necessary for him to stand erect in order to convey an impression of hardness. Like a piece of expensive steel, he bent, slouched and made people conscious, not of his pose, but of the ferocious spring that could snap him straight at any moment. This hint was all he needed; he seldom stood quite straight; he lounged about. Under any clothes he wore, it gave him an air of consummate elegance.

His face did not belong to modern civilization, but to ancient Rome; the face of an eternal patrician. His hair, streaked with gray, was swept smoothly back from a high forehead. His skin was pulled tight over the sharp bones of his face; his mouth was long and thin; his eyes, under slanting eyebrows, were pale blue and photographed like two sardonic white ovals. An artist had asked him once to sit for a painting of Mephistopheles; Wynand had laughed, refusing, and the artist had watched sadly, because the laughter made the face perfect for his purpose.

He slouched casually against the glass pane of his bedroom, the weight of a gun on his palm. Today, he thought; what was today? Did anything happen that would help me now and give meaning to this moment?

Today had been like so many other days behind him that particular features were hard to recognize. He was fifty-one years old, and it was the middle of October in the year 1932; he was certain of this much; the rest took an effort of memory.

He had awakened and dressed at six o'clock this morning; he had never slept more than four hours on any night of his adult life. He descended to his dining room where breakfast was served to him. His penthouse, a small structure, stood on the edge of a vast roof landscaped as a garden. The rooms were a superlative artistic achievement; their simplicity and beauty would have aroused gasps of admiration had this house belonged to anyone else; but people were shocked into silence when they thought that this was the home of the publisher of the New York Banner, the most vulgar newspaper in the country.

After breakfast he went to his study. His desk was piled with every important newspaper, book and magazine received that morning from all over the country. He worked alone at his desk for three hours, reading and making brief notes with a large blue pencil across the printed pages. The notes looked like a spy's shorthand; nobody could decipher them except the dry, middle-aged secretary who entered the study when Wynand left it. He had not heard her voice in five years, but no communication between them was necessary. When he returned to his study in the evening, the secretary and the pile of papers were gone; on his desk he found neatly typed pages containing the things he had wished to be recorded from his morning's work.

At ten o'clock he arrived at the Banner Building, a plain, grimy structure in an undistinguished neighborhood of lower Manhattan. When he walked through the narrow halls of the building, the employees he met wished him a good morning. The greeting was correct and he answered courteously; but his passage had the effect of a death ray that stopped the motor of living organisms.

Among the many hard rules imposed upon the employees of all Wynand enterprises, the hardest was the one demanding that no man pause in his work if Mr. Wynand entered the room, or notice his entrance. Nobody could predict what department he would choose to visit or when. He could appear at any moment in any part of the building — and his presence was as unobtrusive as an electric shock. The employees tried to obey the rule as best they could; but they preferred three hours of overtime to ten minutes of working under his silent observation.

This morning, in his office, he went over the proofs of the Banner's Sunday editorials. He slashed blue lines across the spreads he wished eliminated. He did not sign his initials; everybody knew that only Gail Wynand could make quite that kind of blue slashes, lines that seemed to rip the authors of the copy out of existence.

He finished the proofs, then asked to be connected with the editor of the Wynand Herald, in Springville, Kansas. When he telephoned his provinces, Wynand's name was never announced to the victim. He expected his voice to be known to every key citizen of his empire.

"Good morning, Cummings," he said when the editor answered.

"My God!" gasped the editor. "It isn't ... "

"It is," said Wynand. "Listen, Cummings. One more piece of crap like yesterday's yarn on the Last Rose of Summer and you can go back to the high school Bugle."

"Yes, Mr. Wynand."

Wynand hung up. He asked to be connected with an eminent Senator in Washington.

"Good morning, Senator," he said when the gentleman came on the wire within two minutes. "It is so kind of you to answer this call. I appreciate it. I do not wish to impose on your time. But I felt I owed you an expression of my deepest gratitude. I called to thank you for your work in passing the Hayes-Langston Bill."

"But ... Mr. Wynand!" The Senator's voice seemed to squirm. "It's so nice of you, but ... the Bill hasn't been passed."

"Oh, that's right. My mistake. It will be passed tomorrow." A meeting of the board of directors of the Wynand Enterprises, Inc., had been scheduled for eleven-thirty that morning. The Wynand Enterprises consisted of twenty-two newspapers, seven magazines, three news services and two newsreels. Wynand owned seventy-five percent of the stock. The directors were not certain of their functions or purpose. Wynand had ordered meetings of the board always to start on time, whether he was present or not. Today he entered the board room at twelve twenty-five. A distinguished old gentleman was making a speech. The directors were not allowed to stop or notice Wynand's presence. He walked to the empty chair at the head of the long mahogany table and sat down. No one turned to him; it was as if the chair had just been occupied by a ghost whose existence they dared not admit. He listened silently for fifteen minutes. He got up in the middle of a sentence and left the room as he had entered.

On a large table in his office he spread out maps of Stoneridge, his new real-estate venture, and spent half an hour discussing it with two of his agents. He had purchased a vast tract of land on Long Island, which was to be converted into the Stoneridge Development, a new community of small home owners, every curbstone, street and house to be built by Gail Wynand. The few people who knew of his real-estate activities had told him that he was crazy. It was a year when no one thought of building. But Gail Wynand had made his fortune on decisions which people called crazy.

The architect to design Stoneridge had not been chosen. News of the project had seeped into the starved profession. For weeks Wynand had refused to read letters or answer calls from the best architects of the country and their friends. He refused once more when, at the end of his conference, his secretary informed him that Mr. Ralston Holcombe most urgently requested two minutes of his time on the telephone.

When the agents were gone, Wynand pressed a button on his desk, summoning Alvah Scarret. Scarret entered the office, smiling happily. He always answered that buzzer with the flattered eagerness of an office boy.

"Alvah, what in hell is the Gallant Gallstone?"

Scarret laughed. "Oh, that? It's the title of a novel. By Lois Cook."

"What kind of a novel?"

"Oh, just a lot of drivel. It's supposed to be a sort of prose poem. It's all about a gallstone that thinks that it's an independent entity, a sort of a rugged individualist of the gall bladder, if you see what I mean, and then the man takes a big dose of castor oil — there's a graphic description of the consequences — I'm not sure it's correct medically, but anyway that's the end of the Gallant Gallstone. It's all supposed to prove that there's no such thing as free will."

"How many copies has it sold?"

"I don't know. Not very many, I think. Just among the intelligentsia. But I hear it's picked up some, lately, and ... "

"Precisely. What's going on around here, Alvah?"

"What? Oh, you mean you noticed the few mentions which ... "

"I mean I've noticed it all over the Banner in the last few weeks. Very nicely done, too, if it took me that long to discover that it wasn't accidental."

"What do you mean?"

"What do you think I mean? Why should that particular title appear continuously, in the most inappropriate places? One day it's in a police story about the execution of some murderer who 'died bravely like the Gallant Gallstone.' Two days later it's on page sixteen, in a state yarn from Albany. 'Senator Hazleton thinks he's an independent entity, but it might turn out that he's only a Gallant Gallstone.' Then it's in the obituaries. Yesterday it was on the women's page. Today, it's in the comics. Snooxy calls his rich landlord a Gallant Gallstone."

Scarret chortled peacefully. "Yes, isn't it silly?"

"I thought it was silly. At first. Now I don't."

"But what the hell, Gail! It's not as if it were a major issue and our by-liners plugged it. It's just the small fry, the forty-dollar-a-week ones."

"That's the point. One of them. The other is that the book's not a famous bestseller. If it were, I could understand the title popping into their heads automatically. But it isn't. So someone's doing the popping. Why?"

"Oh, come, Gail! Why would anyone want to bother? And what do we care? If it were a political issue ... But hell, who can get any gravy out of plugging for free will or against free will?"

"Did anyone consult you about this plugging?"

"No. I tell you, nobody's behind it. It's just spontaneous. Just a lot of people who thought it was a funny gag."

"Who was the first one that you heard it from?"

"I don't know ... Let me see ... It was ... yes, I think it was Ellsworth Toohey."

"Have it stopped. Be sure to tell Mr. Toohey."

"Okay, if you say so. But it's really nothing. Just a lot of people amusing themselves."

"I don't like to have anyone amusing himself on my paper."

"Yes, Gail."

At two o'clock Wynand arrived, as guest of honor, at a luncheon given by a National Convention of Women's Clubs. He sat at the right of the chairwoman in an echoing banquet hall filled with the odors of corsages — gardenias and sweet peas — and of fried chicken. After luncheon Wynand spoke. The Convention advocated careers for married women; the Wynand papers had fought against the employment of married women for many years. Wynand spoke for twenty minutes and said nothing at all; but he conveyed the impression that he supported every sentiment expressed at the meeting. Nobody had ever been able to explain the effect of Gail Wynand on an audience, particularly an audience of women. He did nothing spectacular; his voice was low, metallic, inclined to sound monotonous; he was too correct, in a manner that was almost deliberate satire on correctness. Yet he conquered all listeners. People said it was his subtle, enormous virility; it made the courteous voice speaking about school, home and family sound as if he were making love to every old hag present.

Returning to his office, Wynand stopped in the city room. Standing at a tall desk, a big blue pencil in his hand, he wrote on a huge sheet of plain print stock, in letters an inch high, a brilliant, ruthless editorial denouncing all advocates of careers for women. The GW at the end stood like a streak of blue flame. He did not read the piece over — he never needed to — but threw it on the desk of the first editor in sight and walked out of the room. Late in the afternoon, when Wynand was ready to leave his office, his secretary announced that Ellsworth Toohey requested the privilege of seeing him. "Let him in," said Wynand.

Toohey entered, a cautious half-smile on his face, a smile mocking himself and his boss, but with a delicate sense of balance, sixty percent of the mockery directed at himself. He knew that Wynand did not want to see him, and being received was not in his favor.

Wynand sat behind his desk, his face courteously blank. Two diagonal ridges stood out faintly on his forehead, parallel with his slanting eyebrows. It was a disconcerting peculiarity which his face assumed at times; it gave the effect of a double exposure, an ominous emphasis.

"Sit down, Mr. Toohey. Of what service can I be to you?"

"Oh, I'm much more presumptuous than that, Mr. Wynand," said Toohey gaily. "I didn't come to ask for your services, but to offer you mine."

"In what matter?"

"Stoneridge."

The diagonal lines stood out sharper on Wynand's forehead.

"Of what use can a newspaper columnist be to Stoneridge?"

"A newspaper columnist — none, Mr. Wynand. But an architectural expert ... " Toohey let his voice trail into a mocking question mark.

If Toohey's eyes had not been fixed insolently on Wynand's, he would have been ordered out of the office at once. But the glance told Wynand that Toohey knew to what extent he had been plagued by people recommending architects and how hard he had tried to avoid them; and that Toohey had outwitted him by obtaining this interview for a purpose Wynand had not expected. The impertinence of it amused Wynand, as Toohey had known it would.

"All right, Mr. Toohey. Whom are you selling?"

"Peter Keating."

"Well?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Well, sell him to me."

Toohey was stopped, then shrugged brightly and plunged in:

"You understand, of course, that I'm not connected with Mr. Keating in any way. I'm acting only as his friend — and yours." The voice sounded pleasantly informal, but it had lost some of its certainty. "Honestly, I know it does sound trite, but what else can I say? It just happens to be the truth." Wynand would not help him out. "I presumed to come here because I felt it was my duty to give you my opinion. No, not a moral duty. Call it an esthetic one. I know that you demand the best in anything you do. For a project of the size you have in mind there's not another architect living who can equal Peter Keating in efficiency, taste, originality, imagination. That, Mr. Wynand, is my sincere opinion."

"I quite believe you."

"You do?"

"Of course. But, Mr. Toohey, why should I consider your opinion?"

"Well, after all, I am your architectural expert!" He could not keep the edge of anger out of his voice.

"My dear, Mr. Toohey, don't confuse me with my readers." After a moment, Toohey leaned back and spread his hands out in laughing helplessness.

"Frankly, Mr. Wynand, I didn't think my word would carry much weight with you. So I didn't intend trying to sell you Peter Keating."

"No? What did you intend?"

"Only to ask that you give half an hour of your time to someone who can convince you of Peter Keating's ability much better than I can."

"Who is that?"

"Mrs. Peter Keating."

"Why should I wish to discuss this matter with Mrs. Peter Keating?"

"Because she is an exceedingly beautiful woman and an extremely difficult one."

Wynand threw his head back and laughed aloud.

"Good God, Toohey, am I as obvious as that?"

Toohey, blinked, unprepared.

"Really, Mr. Toohey, I owe you an apology, if, by allowing my tastes to become so well known, I caused you to be so crude. But I had no idea that among your many other humanitarian activities you were also a pimp."

Toohey rose to his feet.

"Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Toohey. I have no desire whatever to meet Mrs. Peter Keating."

"I didn't think you would have, Mr. Wynand. Not on my unsupported suggestion. I foresaw that several hours ago. In fact, as early as this morning. So I took the liberty of preparing for myself another chance to discuss this with you. I took the liberty of sending you a present. When you get home tonight, you will find my gift there. Then, if you feel that I was justified in expecting you to do so, you can telephone me and I shall come over at once so that you will be able to tell me whether you wish to meet Mrs. Peter Keating or not."

"Toohey, this is unbelievable, but I believe you're offering me a bribe."

"I am."

"You know, that's the sort of stunt you should be allowed to get away with completely — or lose your job for."

"I shall rest upon your opinion of my present tonight."

"All right, Mr. Toohey, I'll look at your present."

Toohey bowed and turned to go. He was at the door when Wynand added:

"You know, Toohey, one of these days you'll bore me."

"I shall endeavor not to do so until the right time," said Toohey, bowed again and went out.

When Wynand returned to his home, he had forgotten all about Ellsworth Toohey.

That evening, in his penthouse, Wynand had dinner with a woman who had a white face, soft brown hair and, behind her, three centuries of fathers and brothers who would have killed a man for a hint of the things which Gail Wynand had experienced with her.

The line of her arm, when she raised a crystal goblet of water to her lips, was as perfect as the lines of the silver candelabra produced by a matchless talent — and Wynand observed it with the same appreciation. The candlelight flickering on the planes of her face made a sight of such beauty that he wished she were not alive, so that he could look, say nothing and think what he pleased.

"In a month or two, Gail," she said, smiling lazily, "when it gets really cold and nasty, let's take the I Do and sail somewhere straight into the sun, as we did last winter."

I Do was the name of Wynand's yacht. He had never explained that name to anyone. Many women had questioned him about it. This woman had questioned him before. Now, as he remained silent, she asked it again:

"By the way, darling, what does it mean — the name of that wonderful mudscow of yours?"

"It's a question I don't answer," he said. "One of them."

"Well, shall I get my wardrobe ready for the cruise?"

"Green is your best color. It looks well at sea. I love to watch what it does to your hair and your arms. I shall miss the sight of your naked arms against green silk. Because tonight is the last time."

Her fingers lay still on the stem of the glass. Nothing had given her a hint that tonight was to be the last time. But she knew that these words were all he needed to end it. All of Wynand's women had known that they were to expect an end like this and that it was not to be discussed. After a while, she asked, her voice low:

"What reason, Gail?"

"The obvious one."

He reached into his pocket and took out a diamond bracelet; it flashed a cold, brilliant fire in the candlelight: its heavy links hung limply in his fingers. It had no case, no wrapper. He tossed it across the table.

"A memorial, my dear," he said. "Much more valuable than that which it commemorates."

The bracelet hit the goblet and made it ring, a thin, sharp cry, as if the glass had screamed for the woman. The woman made no sound. He knew that it was horrible, because she was the kind to whom one did not offer such gifts at such moments, just as all those other women had been; and because she would not refuse, as all the others had not refused.

"Thank you, Gail," she said, clasping the bracelet about her wrist, not looking at him across the candles.

Later, when they had walked into the drawing room, she stopped and the glance between her long eyelashes moved toward the darkness where the stairway to his bedroom began. "To let me earn the memorial, Gail?" she asked, her voice flat.

He shook his head.

"I had really intended that," he said. "But I'm tired."

When she had gone, he stood in the hall and thought that she suffered, that the suffering was real, but after a while none of it would be real to her, except the bracelet. He could no longer remember the time when such a thought had the power to give him bitterness. When he recalled that he, too, was concerned in the event of this evening, he felt nothing, except wonder why he had not done this long ago.

He went to his library. He sat reading for a few hours. Then he stopped. He stopped short, without reason, in the middle of an important sentence. He had no desire to read on. He had no desire ever to make another effort.

Nothing had happened to him — a happening is a positive reality, and no reality could ever make him helpless; this was some enormous negative — as if everything had been wiped out, leaving a senseless emptiness, faintly indecent because it seemed so ordinary, so unexciting, like murder wearing a homey smile.

Nothing was gone — except desire; no, more than that — the root, the desire to desire. He thought that a man who loses his eyes still retains the concept of sight; but he had heard of a ghastlier blindness — if the brain centers controlling vision are destroyed, one loses even the memory of visual perception.

He dropped the book and stood up. He had no wish to remain on that spot; he had no wish to move from it. He thought that he should go to sleep. It was much too early for him, but he could get up earlier tomorrow. He went to his bedroom, he took a shower, he put on his pyjamas. Then he opened a drawer of his dresser and saw the gun he always kept there. It was the immediate recognition, the sudden stab of interest, that made him pick it up.

It was the lack of shock, when he thought he would kill himself, that convinced him he should. The thought seemed so simple, like an argument not worth contesting. Like a bromide.

Now he stood at the glass wall, stopped by that very simplicity. One could make a bromide of one's life, he thought; but not of one's death.

He walked to the bed and sat down, the gun hanging in his hand. A man about to die, he thought, is supposed to see his whole life in a last flash. I see nothing. But I could make myself see it. I could go over it again, by force. Let me find in it either the will to live on or the reason to end it now.

Gail Wynand, aged twelve, stood in the darkness under a broken piece of wall on the shore of the Hudson, one arm swung back, the fist closed, ready to strike, waiting.

The stones under his feet rose to the remnant of a corner; one side of it hid him from the street; there was nothing behind the other side but a sheer drop to the river. An unlighted, unpaved stretch of waterfront lay before him, sagging structures and empty spaces of sky, warehouses, a crooked cornice hanging somewhere over a window with a malignant light.

In a moment he would have to fight — and he knew it would be for his life. He stood still. His closed fist, held down and back, seemed to clutch invisible wires that stretched to every key spot of his lanky, fleshless body, under the ragged pants and shirt, to the long, swollen tendon of his bare arm, to the taut cords of his neck. The wires seemed to quiver; the body was motionless. He was like a new sort of lethal instrument; if a finger were to touch any part of him, it would release the trigger.

He knew that the leader of the boys' gang was looking for him and that the leader would not come alone. Two of the boys he expected fought with knives; one had a killing to his credit. He waited for them, his own pockets empty. He was the youngest member of the gang and the last to join. The leader had said that he needed a lesson.

It had started over the looting of the barges on the river, which the gang was planning. The leader had decided that the job would be done at night. The gang had agreed; all but Gail Wynand. Gail Wynand had explained, in a slow, contemptuous voice, that the Little Plug-Uglies, farther down the river, had tried the same stunt last week and had left six members in the hands of the cops, plus two in the cemetery; the job had to be done at daybreak, when no one would expect it. The gang hooted him. It made no difference. Gail Wynand was not good at taking orders. He recognized nothing but the accuracy of his own judgment. So the leader wished to settle the issue once and for all. The three boys walked so softly that the people behind the thin walls they passed could not hear their steps. Gail Wynand heard them a block away. He did not move in his corner; only his wrist stiffened a little.

When the moment was right, he leaped. He leaped straight into space, without thought of landing, as if a catapult had sent him on a flight of miles. His chest struck the head of one enemy, his stomach another, his feet smashed into the chest of the third. The four of them went down. When the three lifted their faces, Gail Wynand was unrecognizable; they saw a whirl suspended in the air above them, and something darted at them out of the whirl with a scalding touch.

He had nothing but his two fists; they had five fists and a knife on their side; it did not seem to count. They heard their blows landing with a thud as on hard rubber; they felt the break in the thrust of their knife, which told that it had been stopped and had cut its way out. But the thing they were fighting was invulnerable. He had no time to feel; he was too fast; pain could not catch up with him; he seemed to leave it hanging in the air over the spot where it had hit him and where he was no longer in the next second.

He seemed to have a motor between his shoulder blades to propel his arms in two circles; only the circles were visible; the arms had vanished like the spokes of a speeding wheel. The circle landed each time, and stopped whatever it had landed upon, without a break in its spin. One boy saw his knife disappear in Wynand's shoulder; he saw the jerk of the shoulder that sent the knife slicing down through Wynand's side and flung it out at the belt. It was the last thing the boy saw. Something happened to his chin and he did not feel it when the back of his head struck against a pile of old bricks.

For a long time the two others fought the centrifuge that was now spattering red drops against the walls around them. But it was no use. They were not fighting a man. They were fighting a bodiless human will.

When they gave up, groaning among the bricks, Gail Wynand said in a normal voice: "We'll pull it off at daybreak," and walked away. From that moment on, he was the leader of the gang.

The looting of the barges was done at daybreak, two days later, and came off with brilliant success.

Gail Wynand lived with his father in the basement of an old house in the heart of Hell's Kitchen. His father was a longshoreman, a tall, silent, illiterate man who had never gone to school. His own father and his grandfather were of the same kind, and they knew of nothing but poverty in their family. But somewhere far back in the line there had been a root of aristocracy, the glory of some noble ancestor and then some tragedy, long since forgotten, that had brought the descendants to the gutter. Something about all the Wynands — in tenement, saloon and jail — did not fit their surroundings. Gail's father was known on the waterfront as the Duke.

Gail's mother had died of consumption when he was two years old. He was an only son. He knew vaguely that there had been some great drama in his father's marriage; he had seen a picture of his mother; she did not look and she was not dressed like the women of their neighborhood; she was very beautiful. All life had gone out of his father when she died. He loved Gail; but it was the kind of devotion that did not require two sentences a week.

Gail did not look like his mother or father. He was a throwback to something no one could quite figure out; the distance had to be reckoned, not in generations, but in centuries. He was always too tall for his age, and too thin. The boys called him Stretch Wynand. Nobody knew what he used for muscles; they knew only that he used it.

He had worked at one job after another since early childhood. For a long while he sold newspapers on street corners. One day he walked up to the pressroom boss and stated that they should start a new service — delivering the paper to the reader's door in the morning; he explained how and why it would boost circulation. "Yeah?" said the boss. "I know it will work," said Wynand. "Well, you don't run things around here," said the boss. "You're a fool," said Wynand. He lost the job.

He worked in a grocery store. He ran errands, he swept the soggy wooden floor, he sorted out barrels of rotting vegetables, he helped to wait on customers, patiently weighing a pound of flour or filling a pitcher with milk from a huge can. It was like using a steamroller to press handkerchiefs. But he set his teeth and stuck to it. One day, he explained to the grocer what a good idea it would be to put milk up in bottles, like whisky. "You shut your trap and go wait on Mrs. Sullivan there," said the grocer, "don't you tell me nothing I don't know about my business. You don't run things around here." He waited on Mrs. Sullivan and said nothing.

He worked in a poolroom. He cleaned spittoons and washed up after drunks. He heard and saw things that gave him immunity from astonishment for the rest of his life. He made his greatest effort and learned to keep silent, to keep the place others described as his place, to accept ineptitude as his master — and to wait. No one had ever heard him speak of what he felt. He felt many emotions toward his fellow men, but respect was not one of them.

He worked as bootblack on a ferryboat. He was shoved and ordered around by every bloated horse trader, by every drunken deck hand aboard. If he spoke, he heard some thick voice answering: "You don't run things around here." But he liked this job. When he had no customers, he stood at the rail and looked at Manhattan. He looked at the yellow boards of new houses, at the vacant lots, at the cranes and derricks, at the few towers rising in the distance. He thought of what should be built and what should be destroyed, of the space, the promise and what could be made of it. A hoarse shout — "Hey, boy!" — interrupted him. He went back to his bench and bent obediently over some muddy shoe. The customer saw only a small head of light brown hair and two thin, capable hands.

On foggy evenings, under a gas lantern on a street corner, nobody noticed the slender figure leaning against a lamppost, the aristocrat of the Middle Ages, the timeless patrician whose every instinct cried that he should command, whose swift brain told him why he had the right to do so, the feudal baron created to rule — but born to sweep floors and take orders.

He had taught himself to read and write at the age of five, by asking questions. He read everything he found. He could not tolerate the inexplicable. He had to understand anything known to anyone. The emblem of his childhood — the coat-of-arms he devised for himself in place of the one lost for him centuries ago — was the question mark. No one ever needed to explain anything to him twice. He learned his first mathematics from the engineers laying sewer pipes. He learned geography from the sailors on the waterfront. He learned civics from the politicians at a local club that was a gangsters' hangout. He had never gone to church or to school. He was twelve when he walked into a church. He listened to a sermon on patience and humility. He never came back. He was thirteen when he decided to see what education was like and enrolled at a public school. His father said nothing about this decision, as he said nothing whenever Gail came home battered after a gang fight.

During his first week at school the teacher called on Gail Wynand constantly — it was sheer pleasure to her, because he always knew the answers. When he trusted his superiors and their purpose, he obeyed like a Spartan, imposing on himself the kind of discipline he demanded of his own subjects in the gang. But the force of his will was wasted: within a week he saw that he needed no effort to be first in the class. After a month the teacher stopped noticing his presence; it seemed pointless, he always knew his lesson and she had to concentrate on the slower, duller children. He sat, unflinching, through hours that dragged like chains, while the teacher repeated and chewed and rechewed, sweating to force some spark of intellect from vacant eyes and mumbling voices. At the end of two months, reviewing the rudiments of history which she had tried to pound into her class, the teacher asked: "And how many original states were there in the Union?" No hands were raised. Then Gail Wynand's arm went up. The teacher nodded to him. He rose. "Why," he asked, "should I swill everything down ten times? I know all that."

"You are not the only one in the class," said the teacher. He uttered an expression that struck her white and made her blush fifteen minutes later, when she grasped it fully. He walked to the door. On the threshold he turned to add: "Oh yes. There were thirteen original states." That was the last of his formal education. There were people in Hell's Kitchen who never ventured beyond its boundaries, and others who seldom stepped out of the tenement in which they were born. But Gail Wynand often went for a walk through the best streets of the city. He felt no bitterness against the world of wealth, no envy and no fear. He was simply curious and he felt at home on Fifth Avenue, just as anywhere else. He walked past the stately mansions, his hands in his pockets, his toes sticking out of flat-soled shoes. People glared at him, but it had no effect. He passed by and left behind him the feeling that he belonged on this street and they didn't. He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand.

He wanted to know what made these people different from those in his neighborhood. It was not the clothes, the carriages or the banks that caught his notice; it was the books. People in his neighborhood had clothes, horse wagons and money; degrees were inessential; but they did not read books. He decided to learn what was read by the people on Fifth Avenue. One day, he saw a lady waiting in a carriage at the curb; he knew she was a lady — his judgment on such matters was more acute than the discrimination of the Social Register; she was reading a book. He leaped to the steps of the carriage, snatched the book and ran away. It would have taken swifter, slimmer men than the cops to catch him.

It was a volume of Herbert Spencer. He went through a quiet agony trying to read it to the end. He read it to the end. He understood one quarter of what he had read. But this started him on a process which he pursued with a systematic, fist-clenched determination. Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject. He branched out erratically in all directions; he read volumes of specialized erudition first, and high-school primers afterward. There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.

He discovered the reading room of the Public Library and he went there for a while — to study the layout. Then, one day, at various times, a succession of young boys, painfully combed and unconvincingly washed, came to visit the reading room. They were thin when they came, but not when they left. That evening Gail Wynand had a small library of his own in the corner of his basement. His gang had executed his orders without protest. It was a scandalous assignment; no self-respecting gang had ever looted anything as pointless as books. But Stretch Wynand had given the orders — and one did not argue with Stretch Wynand. He was fifteen when he was found, one morning, in the gutter, a mass of bleeding pulp, both legs broken, beaten by some drunken longshoreman. He was unconscious when found. But he had been conscious that night, after the beating. He had been left alone in a dark alley. He had seen a light around the corner. Nobody knew how he could have managed to drag himself around that corner; but he had; they saw the long smear of blood on the pavement afterward. He had crawled, able to move nothing but his arms. He had knocked against the bottom of a door. It was a saloon, still open. The saloonkeeper came out. It was the only time in his life that Gail Wynand asked for help. The saloonkeeper looked at him with a flat, heavy glance, a glance that showed full consciousness of agony, of injustice — and a stolid, bovine indifference. The saloonkeeper went inside and slammed the door. He had no desire to get mixed up with gang fights.

Years later, Gail Wynand, publisher of the New York Banner, still knew the names of the longshoreman and the saloonkeeper, and where to find them. He never did anything to the longshoreman. But he caused the saloonkeeper's business to be ruined, his home and savings to be lost, and drove the man to suicide.

Gail Wynand was sixteen when his father died. He was alone, jobless at the moment, with sixty-five cents in his pocket, an unpaid rent bill and a chaotic erudition. He decided that the time had come to decide what he would make of his life. He went, that night, to the roof of his tenement and looked at the lights of the city, the city where he did not run things. He let his eyes move slowly from the windows of the sagging hovels around him to the windows of the mansions in the distance. There were only lighted squares hanging in space, but he could tell from them the quality of the structures to which they belonged; the lights around him looked muddy, discouraged; those in the distance were clean and tight. He asked himself a single question: what was there that entered all those houses, the dim and the brilliant alike, what reached into every room, into every person? They all had bread. Could one rule men through the bread they bought? They had shoes, they had coffee, they had ... The course of his life was set.

Next morning, he walked into the office of the editor of the Gazette, a fourth-rate newspaper in a rundown building, and asked for a job in the city room. The editor looked at his clothes and inquired, "Can you spell cat?"

"Can you spell anthropomorphology?" asked Wynand. "We have no jobs here," said the editor. "I'll hang around," said Wynand. "Use me when you want to. You don't have to pay me. You'll put me on salary when you'll feel you'd better."

He remained in the building, sitting on the stairs outside the city room. He sat there every day for a week. No one paid any attention to him. At night he slept in doorways. When most of his money was gone, he stole food, from counters or from garbage pails, before returning to his post on the stairs.

One day a reporter felt sorry for him and, walking down the stairs, threw a nickel into Wynand's lap, saying: "Go buy yourself a bowl of stew, kid." Wynand had a dime left in his pocket. He took the dime and threw it at the reporter, saying: "Go buy yourself a screw." The man swore and went on down. The nickel and the dime remained lying on the steps. Wynand would not touch them. The story was repeated in the city room. A pimply-faced clerk shrugged and took the two coins.

At the end of the week, in a rush hour, a man from the city room called Wynand to run an errand. Other small chores followed. He obeyed with military precision. In ten days he was on salary. In six months he was a reporter. In two years he was an associate editor.

Gail Wynand was twenty when he fell in love. He had known everything there was to know about sex since the age of thirteen. He had had many girls. He never spoke of love, created no romantic illusion and treated the whole matter as a simple animal transaction; but at this he was an expert — and women could tell it, just by looking at him. The girl with whom he fell in love had an exquisite beauty, a beauty to be worshipped, not desired. She was fragile and silent. Her face told of the lovely mysteries within her, left unexpressed.

She became Gail Wynand's mistress. He allowed himself the weakness of being happy. He would have married her at once, had she mentioned it. But they said little to each other. He felt that everything was understood between them.

One evening he spoke. Sitting at her feet, his face raised to her, he allowed his soul to be heard. "My darling, anything you wish, anything I am, anything I can ever be ... That's what I want to offer you — not the things I'll get for you, but the thing in me that will make me able to get them. That thing — a man can't renounce it — but I want to renounce it — so that it will be yours — so that it will be in your service — only for you." The girl smiled and asked: "Do you think I'm prettier than Maggy Kelly?"

He got up. He said nothing and walked out of the house. He never saw that girl again. Gail Wynand, who prided himself on never needing a lesson twice, did not fall in love again in the years that followed.

He was twenty-one when his career on the Gazette was threatened, for the first and only time. Politics and corruption had never disturbed him; he knew all about it; his gang had been paid to help stage beatings at the polls on election days. But when Pat Mulligan, police captain of his precinct, was framed, Wynand could not take it; because Pat Mulligan was the only honest man he had ever met in his life.

The Gazette was controlled by the powers that had framed Mulligan. Wynand said nothing. He merely put in order in his mind such items of information he possessed as would blow the Gazette into hell. His job would be blown with it, but that did not matter. His decision contradicted every rule he had laid down for his career. But he did not think. It was one of the rare explosions that hit him at times, throwing him beyond caution, making of him a creature possessed by the single impulse to have his way, because the rightness of his way was so blindingly total. But he knew that the destruction of the Gazette would be only a first step. It was not enough to save Mulligan.

For three years Wynand had kept one small clipping, an editorial on corruption, by the famous editor of a great newspaper. He had kept it, because it was the most beautiful tribute to integrity he had ever read. He took that clipping and went to see the great editor. He would tell him about Mulligan and together they would beat the machine.

He walked far across town, to the building of the famous paper. He had to walk. It helped to control the fury within him. He was admitted into the office of the editor — he had a way of getting admitted into places against all rules. He saw a fat man at a desk, with thin slits of eyes set close together. He did not introduce himself, but laid the clipping down on the desk and asked: "Do you remember this?" The editor glanced at the clipping, then at Wynand. It was a glance Wynand had seen before: in the eyes of the saloonkeeper who had slammed the door. "How do you expect me to remember every piece of swill I write?" asked the editor.

After a moment, Wynand said: "Thanks." It was the only time in his life that he felt gratitude to anyone. The gratitude was genuine — a payment for a lesson he would never need again. But even the editor knew there was something very wrong in that short "Thanks," and very frightening. He did not know that it had been an obituary on Gail Wynand.

Wynand walked back to the Gazette, feeling no anger toward the editor or the political machine. He felt only a furious contempt for himself, for Pat Mulligan, for all integrity; he felt shame when he thought of those whose victims he and Mulligan had been willing to become. He did not think "victims" — he thought "suckers." He got back to the office and wrote a brilliant editorial blasting Captain Mulligan. "Why, I thought you kinda felt sorry for the poor bastard," said his editor, pleased. "I don't feel sorry for anyone," said Wynand.

Grocers and deck hands had not appreciated Gail Wynand; politicians did. In his years on the paper he had learned how to get along with people. His face had assumed the expression it was to wear for the rest of his life: not quite a smile, but a motionless look of irony directed at the whole world. People could presume that his mockery was intended for the particular things they wished to mock. Besides, it was pleasant to deal with a man untroubled by passion or sanctity.

He was twenty-three when a rival political gang, intent on winning a municipal election and needing a newspaper to plug a certain issue, bought the Gazette. They bought it in the name of Gail Wynand, who was to serve as a respectable front for the machine. Gail Wynand became editor-in-chief. He plugged the issue, he won the election for his bosses. Two years later, he smashed the gang, sent its leaders to the penitentiary, and remained as sole owner of the Gazette.

His first act was to tear down the sign over the door of the building and to throw out the paper's old masthead. The Gazette became the New York Banner. His friends objected. "Publishers don't change the name of a paper," they told him. "This one does," he said.

The first campaign of the Banner was an appeal for money for a charitable cause. Displayed side by side, with an equal amount of space, the Banner ran two stories: one about a struggling young scientist, starving in a garret, working on a great invention; the other about a chambermaid, the sweetheart of an executed murderer, awaiting the birth of her illegitimate child. One story was illustrated with scientific diagrams; the other — with the picture of a loose-mouthed girl wearing a tragic expression and disarranged clothes. The Banner asked its readers to help both these unfortunates. It received nine dollars and forty-five cents for the young scientist; it received one thousand and seventy-seven dollars for the unwed mother. Gail Wynand called a meeting of his staff. He put down on the table the paper carrying both stories and the money collected for both funds. "Is there anyone here who doesn't understand?" he asked. No one answered. He said: "Now you all know the kind of paper the Banner is to be."

The publishers of his time took pride in stamping their individual personalities upon their newspapers. Gail Wynand delivered his paper, body and soul, to the mob. The Banner assumed the appearance of a circus poster in body, of a circus performance in soul. It accepted the same goal — to stun, to amuse and to collect admission. It bore the imprint, not of one, but of a million men. "Men differ in their virtues, if any," said Gail Wynand, explaining his policy, "but they are alike in their vices." He added, looking straight into the questioner's eyes: "I am serving that which exists on this earth in greatest quantity. I am representing the majority — surely an act of virtue?"

The public asked for crime, scandal and sentiment. Gail Wynand provided it. He gave people what they wanted, plus a justification for indulging the tastes of which they had been ashamed. The Banner presented murder, arson, rape, corruption — with an appropriate moral against each. There were three columns of details to one stick of moral. "If you make people perform a noble duty, it bores them," said Wynand. "If you make them indulge themselves, it shames them. But combine the two — and you've got them." He ran stories about fallen girls, society divorces, foundling asylums, red-light districts, charity hospitals. "Sex first," said Wynand. "Tears second. Make them itch and make them cry — and you've got them."

The Banner led great, brave crusades — on issues that had no opposition. It exposed politicians — one step ahead of the Grand Jury; it attacked monopolies — in the name of the downtrodden; it mocked the rich and the successful — in the manner of those who could never be either. It overstressed the glamour of society — and presented society news with a subtle sneer. This gave the man on the street two satisfactions: that of entering illustrious drawing rooms and that of not wiping his feet on the threshold. The Banner was permitted to strain truth, taste and credibility, but not its readers' brain power. Its enormous headlines, glaring pictures and oversimplified text hit the senses and entered men's consciousness without any necessity for an intermediary process of reason, like food shot through the rectum, requiring no digestion.

"News," Gail Wynand told his staff, "is that which will create the greatest excitement among the greatest number. The thing that will knock them silly. The sillier the better, provided there's enough of them."

One day he brought into the office a man he had picked off the street. It was an ordinary man, neither well-dressed nor shabby, neither tall nor short, neither dark nor quite blond; he had the kind of face one could not remember even while looking at it. He was frightening by being so totally undifferentiated; he lacked even the positive distinction of a half-wit. Wynand took him through the building, introduced him to every member of the staff and let him go. Then Wynand called his staff together and told them: "When in doubt about your work, remember that man's face. You're writing for him."

"But, Mr. Wynand," said a young editor, "one can't remember his face."

"That's the point," said Wynand.

When the name of Gail Wynand became a threat in the publishing world, a group of newspaper owners took him aside — at a city charity affair which all had to attend — and reproached him for what they called his debasement of the public taste. "It is not my function," said Wynand, "to help people preserve a self-respect they haven't got. You give them what they profess to like in public. I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to believe."

It was impossible for Wynand not to do a job well. Whatever his aim, his means were superlative. All the drive, the force, the will barred from the pages of his paper went into its making. An exceptional talent was burned prodigally to achieve perfection in the unexceptional. A new religious faith could have been founded on the energy of spirit which he spent upon collecting lurid stories and smearing them across sheets of paper.

The Banner was always first with the news. When an earthquake occurred in South America and no communications came from the stricken area, Wynand chartered a liner, sent a crew down to the scene and had extras on the streets of New York days ahead of his competitors, extras with drawings that represented flames, chasms and crushed bodies. When an S.O.S. was received from a ship sinking in a storm off the Atlantic coast, Wynand himself sped to the scene with his crew, ahead of the Coast Guard; Wynand directed the rescue and brought back an exclusive story with photographs of himself climbing a ladder over raging waves, a baby in his arms. When a Canadian village was cut off from the world by an avalanche, it was the Banner that sent a balloon to drop food and Bibles to the inhabitants. When a coal-mining community was paralyzed by a strike, the Banner opened soup-kitchens and printed tragic stories on the perils confronting the miners' pretty daughters under the pressure of poverty. When a kitten got trapped on the top of a pole, it was rescued by a Banner photographer.

"When there's no news, make it," was Wynand's order. A lunatic escaped from a state institution for the insane. After days of terror for miles around — terror fed by the Banner's dire predictions and its indignation at the inefficiency of the local police — he was captured by a reporter of the Banner. The lunatic recovered miraculously two weeks after his capture, was released, and sold to the Banner an expose of the ill-treatment he had suffered at the institution. It led to sweeping reforms. Afterward, some people said that the lunatic had worked on the Banner before his commitment. It could never be proved.

A fire broke out in a sweatshop employing thirty young girls. Two of them perished in the disaster. Mary Watson, one of the survivors, gave the Banner an exclusive story about the exploitation they had suffered. It led to a crusade against sweatshops, headed by the best women of the city. The origin of the fire was never discovered. It was whispered that Mary Watson had once been Evelyn Drake who wrote for the Banner. It could not be proved.

In the first years of the Banner's existence Gail Wynand spent more nights on his office couch than in his bedroom. The effort he demanded of his employees was hard to perform; the effort he demanded of himself was hard to believe. He drove them like an army; he drove himself like a slave. He paid them well; he got nothing but his rent and meals. He lived in a furnished room at the time when his best reporters lived in suites at expensive hotels. He spent money faster than it came in — and he spent it all on the Banner. The paper was like a luxurious mistress whose every need was satisfied without inquiry about the price.

The Banner was first to get the newest typographical equipment. The Banner was last to get the best newspapermen — last, because it kept them. Wynand raided his competitors' city rooms; nobody could meet the salaries he offered. His procedure evolved into a simple formula. When a newspaperman received an invitation to call on Wynand, he took it as an insult to his journalistic integrity, but he came to the appointment. He came, prepared to deliver a set of offensive conditions on which he would accept the job, if at all. Wynand began the interview by stating the salary he would pay. Then he added: "You might wish, of course, to discuss other conditions — " and seeing the swallowing movement in the man's throat, concluded: "No? Fine. Report to me on Monday."

When Wynand opened his second paper — in Philadelphia — the local publishers met him like European chieftains united against the invasion of Attila. The war that followed was as savage. Wynand laughed over it. No one could teach him anything about hiring thugs to highjack a paper's delivery wagons and beat up news vendors. Two of his competitors perished in the battle. The Wynand Philadelphia Star survived.

The rest was swift and simple like an epidemic. By the time he reached the age of thirty-five there were Wynand papers in all the key cities of the United States. By the time he was forty there were Wynand magazines, Wynand newsreels and most of the Wynand Enterprises, Inc.

A great many activities, not publicized, helped to build his fortune. He had forgotten nothing of his childhood. He remembered the things he had thought, standing as a bootblack at the rail of a ferryboat — the chances offered by a growing city. He bought real estate where no one expected it to become valuable, he built against all advice — and he ran hundreds into thousands. He bought his way into a great many enterprises of all kinds. Sometimes they crashed, ruining everybody concerned, save Gail Wynand. He staged a crusade against a shady streetcar monopoly and caused it to lose its franchise; the franchise was granted to a shadier group, controlled by Gail Wynand. He exposed a vicious attempt to corner the beef market in the Middle West — and left the field clear for another gang, operating under his orders.

He was helped by a great many people who discovered that young Wynand was a bright fellow, worth using. He exhibited a charming complaisance about being used. In each case, the people found that they had been used instead — like the men who bought the Gazette for Gail Wynand.

Sometimes he lost money on his investments, coldly and with full intention. Through a series of untraceable steps he ruined many powerful men: the president of a bank, the head of an insurance company, the owner of a steamship line, and others. No one could discover his motives. The men were not his competitors and he gained nothing from their destruction.

"Whatever that bastard Wynand is after," people said, "it's not after money."

Those who denounced him too persistently were run out of their professions: some in a few weeks, others many years later. There were occasions when he let insults pass unnoticed; there were occasions when he broke a man for an innocuous remark. One could never tell what he would avenge and what he would forgive.

One day he noticed the brilliant work of a young reporter on another paper and sent for him. The boy came, but the salary Wynand mentioned had no effect on him. "I can't work for you, Mr. Wynand," he said with desperate earnestness, "because you ... you have no ideals." Wynand's thin lips smiled. "You can't escape human depravity, kid," he said gently. "The boss you work for may have ideals, but he has to beg money and take orders from many contemptible people. I have no ideals — but I don't beg. Take your choice. There's no other." The boy went back to his paper. A year later he came to Wynand and asked if his offer were still open. Wynand said that it was. The boy had remained on the Banner ever since. He was the only one on the staff who loved Gail Wynand.

Alvah Scarret, sole survivor of the original Gazette, had risen with Wynand. But one could not say that he loved Wynand — he merely clung to his boss with the automatic devotion of a rug under Wynand's feet. Alvah Scarret had never hated anything, and so was incapable of love. He was shrewd, competent and unscrupulous in the innocent manner of one unable to grasp the conception of a scruple. He believed everything he wrote and everything written in the Banner. He could hold a belief for all of two weeks. He was invaluable to Wynand — as a barometer of public reaction.

No one could say whether Gail Wynand had a private life. His hours away from the office had assumed the style of the Banner's front page — but a style raised to a grand plane, as if he were still playing circus, only to a gallery of kings. He bought out the entire house for a great opera performance — and sat alone in the empty auditorium with his current mistress. He discovered a beautiful play by an unknown playwright and paid him a huge sum to have the play performed once and never again; Wynand was the sole spectator at the single performance; the script was burned next morning. When a distinguished society woman asked him to contribute to a worthy charity cause, Wynand handed her a signed blank check — and laughed, confessing that the amount she dared to fill in was less than he would have given otherwise. He bought some kind of Balkan throne for a penniless pretender whom he met in a speakeasy and never bothered to see afterward; he often referred to "my valet, my chauffeur and my king."

At night, dressed in a shabby suit bought for nine dollars, Wynand would often ride the subways and wander through the dives of slum districts, listening to his public. Once, in a basement beer joint, he heard a truck driver denouncing Gail Wynand as the worst exponent of capitalistic evils, in a language of colorful accuracy. Wynand agreed with him and helped him out with a few expressions of his own, from his Hell's Kitchen vocabulary. Then Wynand picked up a copy of the Banner left by someone on a table, tore his own photograph from page 3, clipped it to a hundred-dollar bill, handed it to the truck driver and walked out before anyone could utter a word.

The succession of his mistresses was so rapid that it ceased to be gossip. It was said that he never enjoyed a woman unless he had bought her — and that she had to be the kind who could not be bought.

He kept the details of his life secret by making it glaringly public as a whole. He had delivered himself to the crowd; he was anyone's property, like a monument in a park, like a bus stop sign, like the pages of the Banner. His photographs appeared in his papers more often than pictures of movie stars. He had been photographed in all kinds of clothes, on every imaginable occasion. He had never been photographed naked, but his readers felt as if he had. He derived no pleasure from personal publicity; it was merely a matter of policy to which he submitted. Every corner of his penthouse had been reproduced in his papers and magazines. "Every bastard in the country knows the inside of my icebox and bathtub," he said.

One phase of his life, however, was little known and never mentioned. The top floor of the building under his penthouse was his private art gallery. It was locked. He had never admitted anyone, except the caretaker. A few people knew about it. Once a French ambassador asked him for permission to visit it. Wynand refused. Occasionally, not often, he would descend to his gallery and remain there for hours. The things he collected were chosen by standards of his own. He had famous masterpieces; he had canvases by unknown artists; he rejected the works of immortal names for which he did not care. The estimates set by collectors and the matter of great signatures were of no concern to him. The art dealers whom he patronized reported that his judgment was that of a master.

One night his valet saw Wynand returning from the art gallery below and was shocked by the expression of his face; it was a look of suffering, yet the face seemed ten years younger. "Are you ill, sir?" he asked. Wynand looked at him indifferently and said: "Go to bed."

"We could make a swell spread for the Sunday scandal sheet out of your art gallery," said Alvah Scarret wistfully. "No," said Wynand. "But why, Gail?"

"Look, Alvah. Every man on earth has a soul of his own that nobody can stare at. Even the convicts in a penitentiary and the freaks in a side show. Everybody but me. My soul is spread in your Sunday scandal sheet — in three-color process. So I must have a substitute — even if it's only a locked room and a few objects not to be pawed."

It was a long process and there had been premonitory signs, but Scarret did not notice a certain new trait in Gail Wynand's character until Wynand was forty-five. Then it became apparent to many. Wynand lost interest in breaking industrialists and financiers. He found a new kind of victim. People could not tell whether it was a sport, a mania or a systematic pursuit. They thought it was horrible, because it seemed so vicious and pointless.

It began with the case of Dwight Carson. Dwight Carson was a talented young writer who had achieved the spotless reputation of a man passionately devoted to his convictions. He upheld the cause of the individual against the masses. He wrote for magazines of great prestige and small circulation, which were no threat to Wynand. Wynand bought Dwight Carson. He forced Carson to write a column in the Banner, dedicated to preaching the superiority of the masses over the man of genius. It was a bad column, dull and unconvincing; it made many people angry. It was a waste of space and of a big salary. Wynand insisted on continuing it.

Even Alvah Scarret was shocked by Carson's apostasy. "Anybody else, Gail," he said, "but, honest, I didn't expect it of Carson." Wynand laughed; he laughed too long, as if he could not stop it; his laughter had an edge of hysteria. Scarret frowned; he did not like the sight of Wynand being unable to control an emotion; it contradicted everything he knew of Wynand; it gave Scarret a funny feeling of apprehension, like the sight of a tiny crack in a solid wall; the crack could not possibly endanger the wall — except that it had no business being there.

A few months later Wynand bought a young writer from a radical magazine, a man known for his honesty, and put him to work on a series of articles glorifying exceptional men and damning the masses. That, too, made a great many of his readers angry. He continued it. He seemed not to care any longer about the delicate signs of effect on circulation.

He hired a sensitive poet to cover baseball games. He hired an art expert to handle financial news. He got a socialist to defend factory owners and a conservative to champion labor. He forced an atheist to write on the glories of religion. He made a disciplined scientist proclaim the superiority of mystical intuition over the scientific method. He gave a great symphony conductor a munificent yearly income, for no work at all, on the sole condition that he never conduct an orchestra again.

Some of these men had refused, at first. But they surrendered when they found themselves on the edge of bankruptcy through a series of untraceable circumstances within a few years. Some of the men were famous, others obscure. Wynand showed no interest in the previous standing of his prey. He showed no interest in men of glittering success who had commercialized their careers and held no particular beliefs of any kind. His victims had a single attribute in common: their immaculate integrity.

Once they were broken, Wynand continued to pay them scrupulously. But he felt no further concern for them and no desire to see them again. Dwight Carson became a dipsomaniac. Two men became drug addicts. One committed suicide. This last was too much for Scarret. "Isn't it going too far, Gail?" he asked. "That was practically murder."

"Not at all," said Wynand, "I was merely an outside circumstance. The cause was in him. If lightning strikes a rotten tree and it collapses, it's not the fault of the lightning."

"But what do you call a healthy tree?"

"They don't exist, Alvah," said Wynand cheerfully, "they don't exist."

Alvah Scarret never asked Wynand for an explanation of this new pursuit. By some dim instinct Scarret guessed a little of the reason behind it. Scarret shrugged and laughed, telling people that it was nothing to worry about, it was just "a safety valve." Only two men understood Gail Wynand: Alvah Scarret — partially; Ellsworth Toohey — completely.

Ellsworth Toohey — who wished, above all, to avoid a quarrel with Wynand at that time — could not refrain from a feeling of resentment, because Wynand had not chosen him as a victim. He almost wished Wynand would try to corrupt him, no matter what the consequences. But Wynand seldom noticed his existence.

Wynand had never been afraid of death. Through the years the thought of suicide had occurred to him, not as an intention, but as one of the many possibilities among the chances of life. He examined it indifferently, with polite curiosity, as he examined any possibility — and then forgot it. He had known moments of blank exhaustion when his will deserted him. He had always cured himself by a few hours in his art gallery.

Thus he reached the age of fifty-one, and a day when nothing of consequence happened to him, yet the evening found him without desire to take a step farther.

Gail Wynand sat on the edge of the bed, slumped forward, his elbows on his knees, the gun on the palm of his hand.

Yes, he told himself, there's an answer there somewhere. But I don't want to know it. I don't want to know it.

And because he felt a pang of dread at the root of this desire not to examine his life further, he knew that he would not die tonight. As long as he still feared something, he had a foothold on living; even if it meant only moving forward to an unknown disaster. The thought of death gave him nothing. The thought of living gave him a slender alms — the hint of fear.

He moved his hand, weighing the gun. He smiled, a faint smile of derision. No, he thought, that's not for you. Not yet. You still have the sense of not wanting to die senselessly. You were stopped by that. Even that is a remnant — of something.

He tossed the gun aside on the bed, knowing that the moment was past and the thing was of no danger to him any longer. He got up. He felt no elation; he felt tired; but he was back in his normal course. There were no problems, except to finish this day quickly and go to sleep. He went down to his study to get a drink. When he switched on the light in the study, he saw Toohey's present. It was a huge, vertical crate, standing by his desk. He had seen it earlier in the evening. He had thought "What the hell," and forgotten all about it.

He poured himself a drink and stood sipping it slowly. The crate was too large to escape his field of vision, and as he drank he tried to guess what it could possibly contain. It was too tall and slender for a piece of furniture. He could not imagine what material property Toohey could wish to send him; he had expected something less tangible — a small envelope containing a hint at some sort of blackmail; so many people had tried to blackmail him so unsuccessfully; he did think Toohey would have more sense than that.

By the time he finished his drink, he had found no plausible explanation for the crate. It annoyed him, like a stubborn crossword puzzle. He had a kit of tools somewhere in a drawer of his desk. He found it and broke the crate open.

It was Steven Mallory's statue of Dominique Francon. Gail Wynand walked to his desk and put down the pliers he held as if they were of fragile crystal. Then he turned and looked at the statue again. He stood looking at it for an hour. Then he went to the telephone and dialed Toohey's number. "Hello?" said Toohey's voice, its hoarse impatience confessing that he had been awakened out of sound sleep. "All right. Come over," said Wynand and hung up. Toohey arrived half an hour later. It was his first visit to Wynand's home. Wynand himself answered the doorbell, still dressed in his pyjamas. He said nothing and walked into the study, Toohey following.

The naked marble body, its head thrown back in exaltation, made the room look like a place that did not exist any longer: like the Stoddard Temple. Wynand's eyes rested on Toohey expectantly, a heavy glance of suppressed anger.

"You want, of course, to know the name of the model?" Toohey asked, with just a hint of triumph in his voice.

"Hell, no," said Wynand. "I want to know the name of the sculptor."

He wondered why Toohey did not like the question; there was something more than disappointment in Toohey's face.

"The sculptor?" said Toohey. "Wait ... let me see ... I think I did know it ... It's Steven ... or Stanley ... Stanley something or other ... Honestly, I don't remember."

"If you knew enough to buy this, you knew enough to ask the name and never forget it."

"I'll look it up, Mr. Wynand."

"Where did you get this?"

"In some art shop, you know, one of those places on Second Avenue."

"How did it get there?"

"I don't know. I didn't ask. I bought it because I knew the model."

"You're lying about that. If that were all you saw in it, you wouldn't have taken the chance you took. You know that I've never let anyone see my gallery. Did you think I'd allow you the presumption of contributing to it? Nobody has ever dared offer me a gift of that kind. You wouldn't have risked it, unless you were sure, terribly sure, of how great a work of art this is. Sure that I'd have to accept it. That you'd beat me. And you have."

"I'm glad to hear it, Mr. Wynand."

"If you wish to enjoy that, I'll tell you also that I hate seeing this come from you. I hate your having been able to appreciate it. It doesn't fit you. Though I was obviously wrong about you: you're a greater art expert than I thought you were."

"Such as it is, I'll have to accept this as a compliment and thank you, Mr. Wynand."

"Now what was it you wanted? You intended me to understand that you won't let me have this unless I grant an interview to Mrs. Peter Keating?"

"Why, no, Mr. Wynand. I've made you a present of it. I intended you only to understand that this is Mrs. Peter Keating."

Wynand looked at the statue, then back at Toohey.

"Oh you damn fool!" said Wynand softly.

Toohey stared at him, bewildered.

"So you really did use this as a red lamp in a window?" Wynand seemed relieved; he did not find it necessary to hold Toohey's glance now. "That's better, Toohey. You're not as smart as I thought for a moment."

"But, Mr. Wynand, what ... ?"

"Didn't you realize that this statue would be the surest way to kill any possible appetite I might have for your Mrs. Keating?"

"You haven't seen her, Mr. Wynand."

"Oh, she's probably beautiful. She might be more beautiful than this. But she can't have what that sculptor has given her. And to see that same face, but without any meaning, like a dead caricature — don't you think one would hate the woman for that?"

"You haven't seen her."

"Oh, all right, I'll see her. I told you you should be allowed to get away with your stunt completely or not at all. I didn't promise you to lay her, did I? Only to see her."

"That is all I wanted, Mr. Wynand."

"Have her telephone my office and make an appointment."

"Thank you, Mr. Wynand."

"Besides, you're lying about not knowing the name of that sculptor. But it's too much bother to make you tell me. She'll tell me."

"I'm sure she'll tell you. Though why should I lie?"

"God knows. By the way, if it had been a lesser sculptor, you'd have lost your job over this."

"But, after all, Mr. Wynand, I have a contract."

"Oh, save that for your labor unions, Elsie! And now I think you should wish me a good night and get out of here."

"Yes, Mr. Wynand. I wish you a good night."

Wynand accompanied him to the hall. At the door Wynand said:

"You're a poor businessman, Toohey. I don't know why you're so anxious to have me meet Mrs. Keating. I don't know what your racket is in trying to get a commission for that Keating of yours. But whatever it is, it can't be so valuable that you should have been willing to part with a thing like this in exchange."

2.

"WHY didn't you wear your emerald bracelet?" asked Peter Keating. "Gordon Prescott's so-called fiancee had everybody gaping at her star sapphire."

"I'm sorry, Peter. I shall wear it next time," said Dominique.

"It was a nice party. Did you have a good time?"

"I always have a good time."

"So did I ... Only ... Oh God, do you want to know the truth?"

"No."

"Dominique, I was bored to death. Vincent Knowlton is a pain in the neck. He's such a damn snob. I can't stand him." He added cautiously: "I didn't show it, did I?"

"No. You behaved very well. You laughed at all his jokes — even when no one else did."

"Oh, you noticed that? It always works."

"Yes, I noticed that."

"You think I shouldn't, don't you?"

"I haven't said that."

"You think it's ... low, don't you?"

"I don't think anything is low."

He slumped farther in his armchair; it made his chin press uncomfortably against his chest; but he did not care to move again. A fire crackled in the fireplace of his living room. He had turned out all the lights, save one lamp with a yellow silk shade; but it created no air of intimate relaxation, it only made the place look deserted, like a vacant apartment with the utilities shut off. Dominique sat at the other end of the room, her thin body fitted obediently to the contours of a straight-backed chair; she did not look stiff, only too poised for comfort. They were alone, but she sat like a lady at a public function; like a lovely dress dummy in a public show window — a window facing a busy intersection. They had come home from a tea party at the house of Vincent Knowlton, a prominent young society man, Keating's new friend. They had had a quiet dinner together, and now their evening was free. There were no other social engagements till tomorrow.

"You shouldn't have laughed at theosophy when you spoke to Mrs. Marsh," he said. "She believes in it."

"I'm sorry. I shall be more careful."

He waited to have her open a subject of conversation. She said nothing. He thought suddenly that she had never spoken to him first — in the twenty months of their marriage. He told himself that that was ridiculous and impossible; he tried to recall an occasion when she had addressed him. Of course she had; he remembered her asking him: '"What time will you get back tonight?" and "Do you wish to include the Dixons for Tuesday's dinner?" and many things like that.

He glanced at her. She did not look bored or anxious to ignore him. She sat there, alert and ready, as if his company held her full interest; she did not reach for a book, she did not stare at some distant thought of her own. She looked straight at him, not past him, as if she were waiting for a conversation. He realized that she had always looked straight at him, like this; and now he wondered whether he liked it. Yes, he did, it allowed him no cause to be jealous, not even of her hidden thoughts. No, he didn't, not quite, it allowed no escape, for either one of them.

"I've just finished The Gallant Gallstone," he said. "It's a swell book. It's the product of a scintillating brain, a Puck with tears streaming down his face, a golden-hearted clown holding for a moment the throne of God."

"I read the same book review. In the Sunday Banner."

"I read the book itself. You know I did."

"That was nice of you."

"Huh?" He heard approval and it pleased him.

"It was considerate toward the author. I'm sure she likes to have people read her book. So it was kind to take the time — when you knew in advance what you'd think of it."

"I didn't know. But I happened to agree with the reviewer."

"The Banner has the best reviewers."

"That's true. Of course. So there's nothing wrong in agreeing with them, is there?"

"Nothing whatever. I always agree."

"With whom?"

"With everybody."

"Are you making fun of me, Dominique?"

"Have you given me reason to?"

"No. I don't see how. No, of course I haven't."

"Then I'm not."

He waited. He heard a truck rumbling past, in the street below, and that filled a few seconds; "but when the sound died, he had to speak again:

"Dominique, I'd like to know what you think."

"Of what?"

"Of ... of ... " He searched for an important subject and ended with: " ... of Vincent Knowlton."

"I think he's a man worth kissing the backside of."

"For Christ's sake, Dominique!"

"I'm sorry. That's bad English and bad manners. It's wrong, of course. Well, let's see: Vincent Knowlton is a man whom it's pleasant to know. Old families deserve a great deal of consideration, and we must have tolerance for the opinions of others, because tolerance is the greatest virtue, therefore it would be unfair to force your views on Vincent Knowlton, and if you just let him believe what he pleases, he will be glad to help you too, because he's a very human person."

"Now, that's sensible," said Keating; he felt at home in recognizable language. "I think tolerance is very important, because ... " He stopped. He finished, in an empty voice: "You said exactly the same thing as before."

"Did you notice that," she said. She said it without question mark, indifferently, as a simple fact. It was not sarcasm; he wished it were; sarcasm would have granted him a personal recognition — the desire to hurt him. But her voice had never carried any personal relation to him — not for twenty months.

He stared into the fire. That was what made a man happy — to sit looking dreamily into a fire, at his own hearth, in his own home; that's what he had always heard and read. He stared at the flames, unblinking, to force himself into a complete obedience to an established truth. Just one more minute of it and I will feel happy, he thought, concentrating. Nothing happened.

He thought of how convincingly he could describe this scene to friends and make them envy the fullness of his contentment. Why couldn't he convince himself? He had everything he'd ever wanted. He had wanted superiority — and for the last year he had been the undisputed leader of his profession. He had wanted fame — and he had five thick albums of clippings. He had wanted wealth — and he had enough to insure luxury for the rest of his life. He had everything anyone ever wanted. How many people struggled and suffered to achieve what he had achieved? How many dreamed and bled and died for this, without reaching it? "Peter Keating is the luckiest fellow on earth." How often had he heard that?

This last year had been the best of his life. He had added the impossible to his possessions — Dominique Francon. It had been such a joy to laugh casually when friends repeated to him: "Peter, how did you ever do it?" It had been such a pleasure to introduce her to strangers, to say lightly: "My wife," and to watch the stupid, uncontrolled look of envy in their eyes. Once at a large party an elegant drunk had asked him, with a wink declaring unmistakable intentions: "Say, do you know that gorgeous creature over there?"

"Slightly," Keating had answered, gratified, "she's my wife."

He often told himself gratefully that their marriage had turned out much better than he had expected. Dominique had become an ideal wife. She devoted herself completely to his interests: pleasing his clients, entertaining his friends, running his home. She changed nothing in his existence: not his hours, not his favorite menus, not even the arrangement of his furniture. She had brought nothing with her, except her clothes; she had not added a single book or ash tray to his house. When he expressed his views on any subject, she did not argue — she agreed with him. Graciously, as a matter of natural course, she took second place, vanishing in his background.

He had expected a torrent that would lift him and smash him against some unknown rocks. He had not found even a brook joining his peaceful river. It was more as if the river went on and someone came to swim quietly in his wake; no, not even to swim — that was a cutting, forceful action — but just to float behind him with the current. Had he been offered the power to determine Dominique's attitude after their marriage, he would have asked that she behave exactly as she did.

Only their nights left him miserably unsatisfied. She submitted whenever he wanted her. But it was always as on their first night: an indifferent body in his arms, without revulsion, without answer. As far as he was concerned, she was still a virgin: he had never made her experience anything. Each time, burning with humiliation, he decided never to touch her again. But his desire returned, aroused by the constant presence of her beauty. He surrendered to it, when he could resist no longer; not often.

It was his mother who stated the thing he had not admitted to himself about his marriage. "I can't stand it," his mother said, six months after the wedding. "If she'd just get angry at me once, call me names, throw things at me, it would be all right. But I can't stand this."

"What, Mother?" he asked, feeling a cold hint of panic. "It's no use, Peter," she answered. His mother, whose arguments, opinions, reproaches he had never been able to stop, would not say another word about his marriage. She took a small apartment of her own and moved out of his house. She came to visit him often and she was always polite to Dominique, with a strange, beaten air of resignation. He told himself that he should be glad to be free of his mother; but he was not glad. Yet he could not grasp what Dominique had done to inspire that mounting dread within him. He could find no word or gesture for which to reproach her. But for twenty months it had been like tonight: he could not bear to remain alone with her — yet he did not want to escape her and she did not want to avoid him.

"Nobody's coming tonight?" he asked tonelessly, turning away from the fire.

"No," she said, and smiled, the smile serving as connection to her next words: "Shall I leave you alone, Peter?"

"No!" It was almost a cry. I must not sound so desperate, he thought, while he was saying aloud: "Of course not. I'm glad to have an evening with my wife all to myself."

He felt a dim instinct telling him that he must solve this problem, must learn to make their moments together endurable, that he dare not run from it, for his own sake more than hers.

"What would you like to do tonight, Dominique?"

"Anything you wish."

"Want to go to a movie?"

"Do you?"

"Oh, I don't know. It kills time."

"All right. Let's kill time.'"

"No. Why should we? That sounds awful."

"Does it?"

"Why should we run from our own home? Let's stay here."

"Yes, Peter."

He waited. But the silence, he thought, is a flight too, a worse kind of flight.

"Want to play a hand of Russian Bank?" he asked.

"Do you like Russian Bank?"

"Oh, it kills ti — " He stopped. She smiled.

"Dominique," he said, looking at her, "you're so beautiful. You're always so ... so utterly beautiful. I always want to tell you how I feel about it."

"I'd like to hear how you feel about it. Peter."

"I love to look at you. I always think of what Gordon Prescott said. He said that you are God's perfect exercise in structural mathematics. And Vincent Knowlton said you're a spring morning. And Ellsworth — Ellsworth said you're a reproach to every other female shape on earth."

"And Ralston Holcombe?" she asked.

"Oh, never mind!" he snapped, and turned back to the fire.

I know why I can't stand the silence, he thought. It's because it makes no difference to her at all whether I speak or not; as if I didn't exist and never had existed ... the thing more inconceivable than one's death — never to have been born ... He felt a sudden, desperate desire which he could identify — a desire to be real to her.

"Dominique, do you know what I've been thinking?" he asked eagerly.

"No. What have you been thinking?"

"I've thought of it for some time — all by myself — I haven't mentioned it to anyone. And nobody suggested it. It's my own idea."

"Why, that's fine. What is it?"

"I think I'd like to move to the country and build a house of our own. Would you like that?"

"I'd like it very much. Just as you would. You want to design a home for yourself?"

"Hell, no. Bennett will dash one off for me. He does all our country homes. He's a whiz at it."

"Will you like commuting?"

"No, I think that will be quite an awful nuisance. But you know, everybody that's anybody commutes nowadays. I always feel like a damn proletarian when I have to admit that I live in the city."

"Will you like to see trees and a garden and the earth around you?"

"Oh, that's a lot of nonsense. When will I have the time? A tree's a tree. When you've seen a newsreel of the woods in spring, you've seen it all."

"Will you like to do some gardening? People say it's very nice, working the soil yourself."

"Good God, no! What kind of grounds do you think we'd have? We can afford a gardener, and a good one — so the place will be something for the neighbors to admire."

"Will you like to take up some sport?"

"Yes, I'll like that."

"Which one?"

"I think I'll do better with my golf. You know, belonging to a country club right where you're one of the leading citizens in the community is different from occasional week ends. And the people you meet are different. Much higher class. And the contacts you make ... " He caught himself, and added angrily: "Also, I'll take up horseback riding."

"I like horseback riding. Do you?"

"I've never had much time for it. Well, it does shake your insides unmercifully. But who the hell is Gordon Prescott to think he's the only he-man on earth and plaster his photo in riding clothes right in his reception room?"

"I suppose you will want to find some privacy?"

"Well, I don't believe in that desert-island stuff. I think the house should stand in sight of a major highway, so people would point out, you know, the Keating estate. Who the hell is Claude Stengel to have a country home while I live in a rented flat? He started out about the same time I did, and look where he is and where I am, why, he's lucky if two and a half men ever heard of him, so why should he park himself in Westchester and ... "

And he stopped. She sat looking at him, her face serene.

"Oh God damn it!" he cried. "If you don't want to move to the country, why don't you just say so?"

"I want very much to do anything you want, Peter. To follow any idea you get all by yourself."

He remained silent for a long time.

"What do we do tomorrow night?" he asked, before he could stop himself.

She rose, walked to a desk and picked up her calendar.

"We have the Palmers for dinner tomorrow night," she said.

"Oh, Christ!" he moaned. "They're such awful bores! Why do we have to have them?"

She stood holding the calendar forward between the tips of her fingers, as if she were a photograph with the focus on the calendar and her own figure blurred in its background.

"We have to have the Palmers," she said, "so that we can get the commission for their new store building. We have to get that commission so that we can entertain the Eddingtons for dinner on Saturday. The Eddingtons have no commissions to give, but they're in the Social Register. The Palmers bore you and the Eddingtons snub you. But you have to flatter people whom you despise in order to impress other people who despise you."

"Why do you have to say things like that?"

"Would you like to look at this calendar, Peter?"

"Well, that's what everybody does. That's what everybody lives for."

"Yes, Peter. Almost everybody."

"If you don't approve, why don't you say so?"

"Have I said anything about not approving?"

He thought back carefully. "No," he admitted. "No, you haven't ... But it's the way you put things."

"Would you rather I put it in a more involved way — as I did about Vincent Knowlton?"

"I'd rather ... " Then he cried: "I'd rather you'd express an opinion, God damn it, just once!"

She asked, in the same level monotone: "Whose opinion, Peter? Gordon Prescott's? Ralston Holcombe's? Ellsworth Toohey's?"

He turned to her, leaning on the arm of his chair, half rising, suddenly tense. The thing between them was beginning to take shape. He had a first hint of words that would name it.

"Dominique," he said softly, reasonably, "that's it. Now I know. I know what's been the matter all the time."

"Has anything been the matter?"

"Wait. This is terribly important. Dominique, you've never said, not once, what you thought. Not about anything. You've never expressed a desire. Not of any kind."

"What's wrong about that?"

"But it's ... it's like death. You're not real. You're only a body. Look, Dominique, you don't know it, I'll try to explain. You understand what death is? When a body can't move any more, when it has no ... no will, no meaning. You understand? Nothing. The absolute nothing. Well, your body moves — but that's all. The other, the thing inside you, your — oh, don't misunderstand me, I'm not talking religion, but there's no other word for it, so I'll say: your soul — your soul doesn't exist. No will, no meaning. There's no real you any more."

"What's the real me?" she asked. For the first time, she looked attentive; not compassionate; but, at least, attentive.

"What's the real anyone?" he said, encouraged. "It's not just the body. It's ... it's the soul."

"What is the soul?"

"It's — you. The thing inside you."

"The thing that thinks and values and makes decisions?"

"Yes! Yes, that's it. And the thing that feels. You've — you've given it up."

"So there are two things that one can't give up: One's thoughts and one's desires?"

"Yes! Oh, you do understand! So you see, you're like a corpse to everybody around you. A kind of walking death. That's worse than any active crime. It's ... "

"Negation?"

"Yes. Just blank negation. You're not here. You've never been here. If you'd tell me that the curtains in this room are ghastly and if you'd rip them off and put up some you like — something of you would be real, here, in this room. But you never have. You've never told the cook what dessert you liked for dinner. You're not here, Dominique. You're not alive. Where's your I?"

"Where's yours, Peter?" she asked quietly.

He sat still, his eyes wide. She knew that his thoughts, in this moment, were clear and immediate like visual perception, that the act of thinking was an act of seeing a procession of years behind him.

"It's not true," he said at last, his voice hollow. "It's not true."

"What is not true?"

"What you said."

"I've said nothing. I asked you a question."

His eyes were begging her to speak, to deny. She rose, stood before him, and the taut erectness of her body was a sign of life, the life he had missed and begged for, a positive quality of purpose, but the quality of a judge.

"You're beginning to see, aren't you, Peter? Shall I make it clearer. You've never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn't want to show it. You wanted an act to help your act — a beautiful, complicated act, all twists, trimmings and words. All words. You didn't like what I said about Vincent Knowlton. You liked it when I said the same thing under cover of virtuous sentiments. You didn't want me to believe. You only wanted me to convince you that I believed. My real soul, Peter? It's real only when it's independent — you've discovered that, haven't you? It's real only when it chooses curtains and desserts — you're right about that — curtains, desserts and religions, Peter, and the shapes of buildings. But you've never wanted that. You wanted a mirror. People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. Usually in the more vulgar kind of hotels. Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose. I gave you what you wanted. I became what you are, what your friends are, what most of humanity is so busy being — only with the trimmings. I didn't go around spouting book reviews to hide my emptiness of judgment — I said I had no judgment. I didn't borrow designs to hide my creative impotence — I created nothing. I didn't say that equality is a noble conception and unity the chief goal of mankind — I just agreed with everybody. You call it death, Peter? That kind of death — I've imposed it on you and on everyone around us. But you — you haven't done that. People are comfortable with you, they like you, they enjoy your presence. You've spared them the blank death. Because you've imposed it — on yourself."

He said nothing. She walked away from him, and sat down again, waiting.

He got up. He made a few steps toward her. He said: "Dominique ... " Then he was on his knees before her, clutching her, his head buried against her legs.

"Dominique, it's not true — that I never loved you. I love you, I always have, it was not ... just to show the others — that was not all — I loved you. There were two people — you and another person, a man, who always made me feel the same thing — not fear exactly, but like a wall, a steep wall to climb — like a command to rise — I don't know where — but a feeling going up — I've always hated that man — but you, I wanted you — always — that's why I married you — when I knew you despised me — so you should have forgiven me that marriage — you shouldn't have taken your revenge like this — not like this, Dominique — Dominique, I can't fight back, I — "

"Who is the man you hated, Peter?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Who is he?"

"Nobody. I ... "

"Name him."

"Howard Roark."

She said nothing for a long time. Then she put her hand on his hair. The gesture had the form of gentleness.

"I never wanted to take a revenge on you, Peter," she said softly.

"Then — why?"

"I married you for my own reasons. I acted as the world demands one should act. Only I can do nothing halfway. Those who can, have a fissure somewhere inside. Most people have many. They lie to themselves — not to know that. I've never lied to myself. So I had to do what you all do — only consistently and completely. I've probably destroyed you. If I could care, I'd say I'm sorry. That was not my purpose."

"Dominique, I love you. But I'm afraid. Because you've changed something in me, ever since our wedding, since I said yes to you — even if I were to lose you now, I couldn't go back to what I was before — you took something I had ... "

"No. I took something you never had. I grant you that's worse."

"What?"

"It's said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect. But that's not true. Self-respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it."

"Dominique, I ... I don't want to talk."

She looked down at his face resting against her knees, and he saw pity in her eyes, and for one moment he knew what a dreadful thing true pity is, but he kept no knowledge of it, because he slammed his mind shut before the words in which he was about to preserve it.

She bent down and kissed his forehead. It was the first kiss she had ever given him.

"I don't want you to suffer, Peter," she said gently. "This, now, is real — it's I — it's my own words — I don't want you to suffer — I can't feel anything else — but I feel that much."

He pressed his lips to her hand.

When he raised his head, she looked at him as if, for a moment, he was her husband. She said: "Peter, if you could hold on to it — to what you are now — "

"I love you," he said.

They sat silently together for a long time. He felt no strain in the silence.

The telephone rang.

It was not the sound that destroyed the moment; it was the eagerness with which Keating jumped up and ran to answer it. She heard his voice through the open door, a voice indecent in its relief:

"Hello? ... Oh, hello, Ellsworth! ... No, not a thing ... Free as a lark ... Sure, come over, come right over! ... Okey-doke!"

"It's Ellsworth," he said, returning to the living room. His voice was gay and it had a touch of insolence. "He wants to drop in."

She said nothing.

He busied himself emptying ash trays that contained a single match or one butt, gathering newspapers, adding a log to the fire that did not need it, lighting more lamps. He whistled a tune from a screen operetta.

He ran to open the door when he heard the bell.

"How nice," said Toohey, coming in. "A fire and just the two of you. Hello, Dominique. Hope I'm not intruding."

"Hello, Ellsworth," she said.

"You're never intruding," said Keating. "I can't tell you how glad I am to see you." He pushed a chair to the fire. "Sit down here, Ellsworth. What'll you have? You know, when I heard your voice on the phone ... well, I wanted to jump and yelp like a pup."

"Don't wag your tail, though," said Toohey. "No, no drinks, thanks. How have you been, Dominique?"

"Just as I was a year ago," she said.

"But not as you were two years ago?"

"No."

"What did we do two years ago this time?" Keating asked idly.

"You weren't married," said Toohey. "Prehistorical period. Let me see — what happened then? I think the Stoddard Temple was just being completed."

"Oh that," said Keating.

Toohey asked: "Hear anything about your friend, Roark ... Peter?"

"No. I don't think he's worked for a year or more. He's finished, this time."

"Yes, I think so ... What have you been doing, Peter?"

"Nothing much ... Oh, I've just read The Gallant Gallstone."

"Liked it?"

"Yes! You know, I think it's a very important book. Because it's true that there's no such thing as free will. We can't help what we are or what we do. It's not our fault. Nobody's to blame for anything. It's all in your background and ... and your glands. If you're good, that's no achievement of yours — you were lucky in your glands. If you're rotten, nobody should punish you — you were unlucky, that's all." He was saying it defiantly, with a violence inappropriate to a literary discussion. He was not looking at Toohey nor at Dominique, but speaking to the room and to what that room had witnessed.

"Substantially correct," said Toohey. "To be logical, however, we should not think of punishment for those who are rotten. Since they suffered through no fault of their own, since they were unlucky and underendowed, they should deserve a compensation of some sort — more like a reward."

"Why — yes!" cried Keating. "That's ... that's logical."

"And just," said Toohey.

"Got the Banner pretty much where you want it, Ellsworth?" asked Dominique.

"What's that in reference to?"

"The Gallant Gallstone."

"Oh. No, I can't say I have. Not quite. There are always the — imponderables."

"What are you talking about?" asked Keating. "Professional gossip," said Toohey. He stretched his hands to the fire and flexed his fingers playfully. "By the way, Peter, are you doing anything about Stoneridge?"

"God damn it," said Keating. "What's the matter?"

"You know what's the matter. You know the bastard better than I do. To have a project like that going up, now, when it's manna in the desert, and of all people to have that son of a bitch Wynand doing it!"

"What's the matter with Mr. Wynand?"

"Oh come, Ellsworth! You know very well if it were anyone else, I'd get that commission just like that" — he snapped his fingers — "I wouldn't even have to ask, the owner'd come to me. Particularly when he knows that an architect like me is practically sitting on his fanny now, compared to the work our office could handle. But Mr. Gail Wynand! You'd think he was a holy Lama who's just allergic to the air breathed by architects!"

"I gather you've tried?"

"Oh, don't talk about it. It makes me sick. I think I've spent three hundred dollars feeding lunches and pouring liquor into all sorts of crappy people who said they could get me to meet him. All I got is hangovers. I think it'd be easier to meet the Pope."

"I gather you do want to get Stoneridge?"

"Are you baiting me, Ellsworth? I'd give my right arm for it."

"That wouldn't be advisable. You couldn't make any drawings then — or pretend to. It would be preferable to give up something less tangible."

"I'd give my soul."

"Would you, Peter?" asked Dominique. "What's on your mind, Ellsworth?" Keating snapped. "Just a practical suggestion," said Toohey. "Who has been your most effective salesman in the past and got you some of your best commissions?"

"Why — Dominique I guess."

"That's right. And since you can't get to Wynand and it wouldn't do you any good if you did, don't you think Dominique is the one who'll be able to persuade him?" Keating stared at him. "Are you crazy, Ellsworth?" Dominique leaned forward. She seemed interested.

"From what I've heard," she said, "Gail Wynand does not do favors for a woman, unless she's beautiful. And if she's beautiful, he doesn't do it as a favor."

Toohey looked at her, underscoring the fact that he offered no denial.

"It's silly," snapped Keating angrily. "How would Dominique ever get to see him?"

"By telephoning his office and making an appointment," said Toohey.

"Who ever told you he'd grant it?"

"He did."

"When?!"

"Late last night. Or early this morning, to be exact."

"Ellsworth!" gasped Keating. He added: "I don't believe it."

"I do," said Dominique, "or Ellsworth wouldn't have started this conversation." She smiled at Toohey. "So Wynand promised you to see me?"

"Yes, my dear."

"How did you work that?"

"Oh, I offered him a convincing argument. However, it would be advisable not to delay it. You should telephone him tomorrow — if you wish to do it."

"Why can't she telephone now?" said Keating. "Oh, I guess it's too late. You'll telephone first thing in the morning."

She looked at him, her eyes half closed, and said nothing.

"It's a long time since you've taken any active interest in Peter's career," said Toohey. "Wouldn't you like to undertake a difficult feat like that — for Peter's sake?"

"If Peter wants me to."

"If I want you to?" cried Keating. "Are you both crazy? It's the chance of a lifetime, the ... " He saw them both looking at him curiously. He snapped: "Oh, rubbish!"

"What is rubbish, Peter?" asked Dominique.

"Are you going to be stopped by a lot of fool gossip? Why, any other architect's wife'd crawl on her hands and knees for a chance like that to ... "

"No other architect's wife would be offered the chance," said Toohey. "No other architect has a wife like Dominique. You've always been so proud of that, Peter."

"Dominique can take care of herself in any circumstances."

"There's no doubt about that."

"All right, Ellsworth," said Dominique. "I'll telephone Wynand tomorrow."

"Ellsworth, you're wonderful!" said Keating, not looking at her.

"I believe I'd like a drink now," said Toohey. "We should celebrate."

When Keating hurried out to the kitchen, Toohey and Dominique looked at each other. He smiled. He glanced at the door through which Keating had gone, then nodded to her faintly, amused.

"You expected it," said Dominique.

"Of course."

"Now what's the real purpose, Ellsworth?"

"Why, I want to help you get Stoneridge for Peter. It's really a terrific commission."

"Why are you so anxious to have me sleep with Wynand?"

"Don't you think it would be an interesting experience for all concerned?"

"You're not satisfied with the way my marriage has turned out, are you, Ellsworth?"

"Not entirely. Just about fifty percent. Well, nothing's perfect in this world. One gathers what one can and then one tries further."

"You were very anxious to have Peter marry me. You knew what the result would be, better than Peter or I."

"Peter didn't know it at all."

"Well, it worked — fifty percent. You got Peter Keating where you wanted him — the leading architect of the country who's now mud clinging to your galoshes."

"I've never liked your style of expression, but it's always been accurate. I should have said: who's now a soul wagging its tail. Your style is gentler."

"But the other fifty percent, Ellsworth? A failure?"

"Approximately total. My fault. I should have known better than to expect anyone like Peter Keating, even in the role of husband, to destroy you."

"Well, you're frank."

"I told you once it's the only method that will work with you. Besides, surely it didn't take you two years to discover what I wanted of that marriage?"

"So you think Gail Wynand will finish the job?"

"Might. What do you think?"

"I think I'm only a side issue again. Didn't you call it 'gravy' once? What have you got against Wynand?"

He laughed; the sound betrayed that he had not expected the question. She said contemptuously: "Don't show that you're shocked, Ellsworth."

"All right. We're taking it straight. I have nothing specific against Mr. Gail Wynand. I've been planning to have him meet you, for a long time. If you want minor details, he did something that annoyed me yesterday morning. He's too observant. So I decided the time was right."

"And there was Stoneridge."

"And there was Stoneridge. I knew that part of it would appeal to you. You'd never sell yourself to save your country, your soul or the life of a man you loved. But you'll sell yourself to get a commission he doesn't deserve for Peter Keating. See what will be left of you afterward. Or of Gail Wynand. I'll be interested to see it, too."

"Quite correct, Ellsworth."

"All of it? Even the part about a man you loved — if you did?"

"Yes."

"You wouldn't sell yourself for Roark? Though, of course, you don't like to hear that name pronounced."

"Howard Roark," she said evenly.

"You have a great deal of courage, Dominique."

Keating returned, carrying a tray of cocktails. His eyes were feverish and he made too many gestures.

Toohey raised his glass. He said:

"To Gail Wynand and the New York Banner!"

3.

GAIL WYNAND rose and met her halfway across his office.

"How do you do, Mrs. Keating," he said.

"How do you do, Mr. Wynand," said Dominique.

He moved a chair for her, but when she sat down he did not cross to sit behind his desk, he stood studying her professionally, appraisingly. His manner implied a self-evident necessity, as if his reason were known to her and there could be nothing improper in this behavior.

"You look like a stylized version of your own stylized version," he said. "As a rule seeing the models of art works tends to make one atheistic. But this time it's a close one between that sculptor and God."

"What sculptor?"

"The one who did that statue of you."

He had felt that there was some story behind the statue and he became certain of it now, by something in her face, a tightening that contradicted, for a second, the trim indifference of her self-control.

"Where and when did you see that statue, Mr. Wynand?"

"In my art gallery, this morning."

"Where did you get it?"

It was his turn to show perplexity. "But don't you know that?"

"No."

"Your friend Ellsworth Toohey sent it to me. As a present."

"To get this appointment for me?"

"Not through as direct a motivation as I believe you're thinking. But in substance — yes."

"He hasn't told me that."

"Do you mind my having that statue?"

"Not particularly."

"I expected you to say that you were delighted." — "I'm not."

He sat down, informally, on the outer edge of his desk, his legs stretched out, his ankles crossed. He asked:

"I gather you lost track of that statue and have been trying to find it?"

"For two years."

"You can't have it." He added, watching her: "You might have Stoneridge."

"I shall change my mind. I'm delighted that Toohey gave it to you."

He felt a bitter little stab of triumph — and of disappointment, in thinking that he could read her mind and that her mind was obvious, after all. He asked:

"Because it gave you this interview?"

"No. Because you're the person before last in the world whom I'd like to have that statue. But Toohey is last."

He lost the triumph; it was not a thing which a woman intent on Stoneridge should have said or thought. He asked:

"You didn't know that Toohey had it?"

"No."

"We should get together on our mutual friend, Mr. Ellsworth Toohey. I don't like being a pawn and I don't think you do or could ever be made to. There are too many things Mr. Toohey chose not to tell. The name of that sculptor, for instance."

"He didn't tell you that?"

"No."

"Steven Mallory."

"Mallory? ... Not the one who tried to ... " He laughed aloud.

"What's the matter?"

"Toohey told me he couldn't remember the name. That name."

"Does Mr. Toohey still astonish you?"

"He has, several times, in the last few days. There's a special kind of subtlety in being as blatant as he's been. A very difficult kind. I almost like his artistry."

"I don't share your taste."

"Not in any field? Not in sculpture — or architecture?"

"I'm sure not in architecture."

"Isn't that the utterly wrong thing for you to say?"

"Probably."

He looked at her. He said: "You're interesting."

"I didn't intend to be."

"That's your third mistake."

"Third?"

"The first was about Mr. Toohey. In the circumstances, one would expect you to praise him to me. To quote him. To lean on his great prestige in matters of architecture."

"But one would expect you to know Ellsworth Toohey. That should disqualify any quotations."

"I intended to say that to you — had you given me the chance you won't give me."

"That should make it more entertaining."

"You expected to be entertained?"

"I am."

"About the statue?" It was the only point of weakness he had discovered.

"No." Her voice was hard. "Not about the statue."

"Tell me, when was it made and for whom?"

"Is that another thing Mr. Toohey forgot?"

"Apparently."

"Do you remember a scandal about a building called the Stoddard Temple? Two years ago. You were away at the time."

"The Stoddard Temple ... How do you happen to know where I was two years ago? ... Wait, the Stoddard Temple. I remember: a sacrilegious church or some such object that gave the Bible brigade a howling spree."

"Yes."

"There was ... " He stopped. His voice sounded hard and reluctant — like hers. "There was the statue of a naked woman involved."

"Yes."

"I see."

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, his voice harsh, as if he were holding back some anger whose object she could not guess:

"I was somewhere around Bali at the time. I'm sorry all New York saw that statue before I did. But I don't read newspapers when I'm sailing. There's a standing order to fire any man who brings a Wynand paper around the yacht."

"Have you ever seen pictures of the Stoddard Temple?"

"No. Was the building worthy of the statue?"

"The statue was almost worthy of the building."

"It has been destroyed, hasn't it?"

"Yes. With the help of the Wynand papers."

He shrugged. "I remember Alvah Scarret had a good time with it. A big story. Sorry I missed it. But Alvah did very well. Incidentally, how did you know that I was away and why has the fact of my absence remained in your memory?"

"It was the story that cost me my job with you."

"Your job? With me?"

"Didn't you know that my name was Dominique Francon?"

Under the trim jacket his shoulders made a sagging movement forward; it was surprise — and helplessness. He stared at her, quite simply. After a while, he said: "No."

She smiled indifferently. She said: "It appears that Toohey wanted to make it as difficult for both of us as he could."

"To hell with Toohey. This has to be understood. It doesn't make sense. You're Dominique Francon?"

"I was."

"You worked here, in this building, for years?"

"For six years."

"Why haven't I met you before?"

"I'm sure you don't meet every one of your employees."

"I think you understand what I mean."

"Do you wish me to state it for you?"

"Yes."

"Why haven't I tried to meet you before?"

"Yes."

"I had no desire to."

"That, precisely, doesn't make sense."

"Shall I let this go by or understand it?"

"I'll spare you the choice. With the kind of beauty you possess and with knowledge of the kind of reputation I am said to possess — why didn't you attempt to make a real career for yourself on the Banner!"

"I never wanted a real career on the Banner."

"Why?"

"Perhaps for the same reason that makes you forbid Wynand papers on your yacht."

"It's a good reason," he said quietly. Then he asked, his voice casual again: "Let's see, what was it you did to get fired? You went against our policy, I believe?"

"I tried to defend the Stoddard Temple."

"Didn't you know better than to attempt sincerity on the Banner?"

"I intended to say that to you — if you'd given me the chance."

"Are you being entertained?"

"I wasn't, then. I liked working here."

"You're the only one who's ever said that in this building."

"I must be one of two."

"Who's the other?"

"Yourself, Mr. Wynand."

"Don't be too sure of that." Lifting his head, he saw the hint of amusement in her eyes and asked: "You said it just to trap me into that kind of a statement?"

"Yes, I think so," she answered placidly. "Dominique Francon ... " he repeated, not addressing her. "I used to like your stuff. I almost wish you were here to ask for your old job."

"I'm here to discuss Stoneridge."

"Ah, yes, of course." He settled back, to enjoy a long speech of persuasion. He thought it would be interesting to hear what arguments she'd choose and how she'd act in the role of petitioner. "Well, what do you wish to tell me about that?"

"I should like you to give that commission to my husband. I understand, of course, that there's no reason why you should do so — unless I agree to sleep with you in exchange. If you consider that a sufficient reason — I am willing to do it."

He looked at her silently, allowing no hint of personal reaction in his face. She sat looking up at him, faintly astonished by his scrutiny, as if her words had deserved no special attention. He could not force on himself, though he was seeking it fiercely, any other impression of her face than the incongruous one of undisturbed purity.

He said:

"That is what I was to suggest. But not so crudely and not on our first meeting."

"I have saved you time and lies."

"You love your husband very much?"

"I despise him."

"You have a great faith in his artistic genius?"

"I think he's a third-rate architect."

"Then why are you doing this?"

"It amuses me."

"I thought I was the only who acted on such motives."

"You shouldn't mind. I don't believe you've ever found originality a desirable virtue, Mr. Wynand."

"Actually, you don't care whether your husband gets Stoneridge or not?"

"No."

"And you have no desire to sleep with me?"

"None at all."

"I could admire a woman who'd put on an act like that. Only it's not an act."

"It's not. Please don't begin admiring me. I have tried to avoid it."

Whenever he smiled no obvious movement was required of his facial muscles; the hint of mockery was always there and it merely came into sharper focus for a moment, to recede imperceptibly again. The focus was sharper now.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "your chief motive is I, after all. The desire to give yourself to me." He saw the glance she could not control and added: "No, don't enjoy the thought that I have fallen into so gross an error. I didn't mean it in the usual sense. But in its exact opposite. Didn't you say you considered me the person before last in the world? You don't want Stoneridge. You want to sell yourself for the lowest motive to the lowest person you can find."

"I didn't expect you to understand that," she said simply.

"You want — men do that sometimes, not women — to express through the sexual act your utter contempt for me."

"No, Mr. Wynand. For myself."

The thin line of his mouth moved faintly, as if his lips had caught the first hint of a personal revelation — an involuntary one and, therefore, a weakness — and were holding it tight while he spoke:

"Most people go to very to very great lengths in order to convince themselves of their self-respect."

"Yes."

"And, of course, a quest for self-respect is proof of its lack."

"Yes."

"Do you see the meaning of a quest for self-contempt?"

"That I lack it?"

"And that you'll never achieve it."

"I didn't expect you to understand that either."

"I won't say anything else — or I'll stop being the person before last in the world and I'll become unsuitable to your purpose." He rose. "Shall I tell you formally that I accept your offer?"

She inclined her head in agreement.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "I don't care whom I choose to build Stoneridge. I've never hired a good architect for any of the things I've built. I give the public what it wants. I was stuck for a choice this time, because I'm tired of the bunglers who've worked for me, and it's hard to decide without standards or reason. I'm sure you don't mind my saying this. I'm really grateful to you for giving me a much better motive than any I could hope to find."

"I'm glad you didn't say that you've always admired the work of Peter Keating."

"You didn't tell me how glad you were to join the distinguished list of Gail Wynand's mistresses."

"You may enjoy my admitting it, if you wish, but I think we'll get along very well together."

"Quite likely. At least, you've given me a new experience: to do what I've always done — but honestly. Shall I now begin to give you my orders? I won't pretend they're anything else."

"If you wish."

"You'll go with me for a two months' cruise on my yacht. We'll sail in ten days. When we come back, you'll be free to return to your husband — with the contract for Stoneridge."

"Very well."

"I should like to meet your husband. Will you both have dinner with me Monday night?"

"Yes, if you wish."

When she rose to leave, he asked:

"Shall I tell you the difference between you and your statue?"

"No."

"But I want to. It's startling to see the same elements used in two compositions with opposite themes. Everything about you in that statue is the theme of exaltation. But your own theme is suffering."

"Suffering? I'm not conscious of having shown that."

"You haven't. That's what I meant. No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain."

Wynand telephoned his art dealer and asked him to arrange a private showing of Steven Mallory's work. He refused to meet Mallory in person; he never met those whose work he liked. The art dealer executed the order in great haste. Wynand bought five of the pieces he saw — and paid more than the dealer had hoped to ask. "Mr. Mallory would like to know," said the dealer, "what brought him to your attention."

"I saw one of his works."

"Which one?"

"It doesn't matter."

Toohey had expected Wynand to call for him after the interview with Dominique. Wynand had not called. But a few days later, meeting Toohey by chance in the city room, Wynand asked aloud:

"Mr. Toohey, have so many people tried to kill you that you can't remember their names?"

Toohey smiled and said: "I'm sure quite so many would like to."

"You flatter your fellow men," said Wynand, walking away.

Peter Keating stared at the brilliant room of the restaurant. It was the most exclusive place in town, and the most expensive. Keating gloated, chewing the thought that he was here as the guest of Gail Wynand.

He tried not to stare at the gracious elegance of Wynand's figure across the table. He blessed Wynand for having chosen to give this dinner in a public place. People were gaping at Wynand — discreetly and with practiced camouflage, but gaping nevertheless — and their attention included the two guests at Wynand's table.

Dominique sat between the two men. She wore a white silk dress with long sleeves and a cowl neck, a nun's garment that acquired the startling effect of an evening gown only by being so flagrantly unsuited to that purpose. She wore no jewelry. Her gold hair looked like a hood. The dull white silk moved in angular planes with the movements of her body, revealing it in the manner of cold innocence, the body of a sacrificial object publicly offered, beyond the need of concealment or desire. Keating found it unattractive. He noticed that Wynand seemed to admire it.

Someone at a distant table stared in their direction insistently, someone tall and bulky. Then the big shape rose to its feet — and Keating recognized Ralston Holcombe hurrying toward them.

"Peter, my boy, so glad to see you," boomed Holcombe, shaking his hand, bowing to Dominique, conspicuously ignoring Wynand. "Where have you been hiding? Why don't we see you around any more?" They had had luncheon together three days ago.

Wynand had risen and stood leaning forward a little, courteously. Keating hesitated; then, with obvious reluctance, said:

"Mr. Wynand — Mr. Holcombe."

"Not Mr. Gail Wynand?" said Holcombe with splendid innocence.

"Mr. Holcombe, if you saw one of the cough-drop Smith brothers in real life, would you recognize him?" asked Wynand.

"Why — I guess so," said Holcombe, blinking.

"My face, Mr. Holcombe, is just as much of a public bromide."

Holcombe muttered a few benevolent generalities and escaped.

Wynand smiled affectionately. "You didn't have to be afraid of introducing Mr. Holcombe to me, Mr. Keating, even though he is an architect."

"Afraid, Mr. Wynand?"

"Unnecessarily, since it's all settled. Hasn't Mrs. Keating told you that Stoneridge is yours?"

"I ... no, she hasn't told me ... I didn't know ... " Wynand was smiling, but the smile remained fixed, and Keating felt compelled to go on talking until some sign stopped him. "I hadn't quite hoped ... not so soon ... of course, I thought this dinner might be a sign ... help you to decide ... " He blurted out involuntarily: "Do you always throw surprises like that — just like that?"

"Whenever I can," said Wynand gravely.

"I shall do my best to deserve this honor and live up to your expectations, Mr. Wynand."

"I have no doubt about that," said Wynand.

He had said little to Dominique tonight. His full attention seemed centered on Keating.

"The public has been kind to my past endeavors," said Keating, "but I shall make Stoneridge my best achievement."

"That is quite a promise, considering the distinguished list of your works."

"I had not hoped that my works were of sufficient importance to attract your attention, Mr. Wynand."

"But I know them quite well. The Cosmo-Slotnick Building, which is pure Michelangelo." Keating's face spread in incredulous pleasure; he knew that Wynand was a great authority on art and would not make such comparisons lightly. "The Prudential Bank Building, which is genuine Palladio. The Slottern Department Store, which is snitched Christopher Wren." Keating's face had changed. "Look what an illustrious company I get for the price of one. Isn't it quite a bargain?"

Keating smiled, his face tight, and said:

"I've heard about your brilliant sense of humor, Mr. Wynand."

"Have you heard about my descriptive style?"

"What do you mean?"

Wynand half turned in his chair and looked at Dominique, as if he were inspecting an inanimate object.

"Your wife has a lovely body, Mr. Keating. Her shoulders are too thin, but admirably in scale with the rest of her. Her legs are too long, but that gives her the elegance of line you'll find in a good yacht. Her breasts are beautiful, don't you think?"

"Architecture is a crude profession, Mr. Wynand," Keating tried to laugh. "It doesn't prepare one for the superior sort of sophistication."

"You don't understand me, Mr. Keating?"

"If I didn't know you were a perfect gentleman, I might misunderstand it, but you can't fool me."

"That is just what I am trying not to do."

"I appreciate compliments, Mr. Wynand, but I'm not conceited enough to think that we must talk about my wife."

"Why not, Mr. Keating? It is considered good form to talk of the things one has — or will have — in common."

"Mr. Wynand, I ... I don't understand."

"Shall I be more explicit?"

"No, I ... "

"No? Shall we drop the subject of Stoneridge?"

"Oh, let's talk about Stoneridge! I ... "

"But we are, Mr. Keating."

Keating looked at the room about them. He thought that things like this could not be done in such a place; the fastidious magnificence made it monstrous; he wished it were a dank cellar. He thought: blood on paving stones — all right, but not blood on a drawing-room rug ...

"Now I know this is a joke, Mr. Wynand," he said.

"It is my turn to admire your sense of humor, Mr. Keating."

"Things like ... like this aren't being done ... "

"That's not what you mean at all, Mr. Keating. You mean, they're being done all the time, but not talked about."

"I didn't think ... "

"You thought it before you came here. You didn't mind. I grant you I'm behaving abominably. I'm breaking all the rules of charity. It's extremely cruel to be honest."

"Please, Mr. Wynand, let's ... drop it. I don't know what ... I'm supposed to do."

"That's simple. You're supposed to slap my face." Keating giggled. "You were supposed to do that several minutes ago."

Keating noticed that his palms were wet and that he was trying to support his weight by holding on to the napkin on his lap. Wynand and Dominique were eating, slowly and graciously, as if they were at another table. Keating thought that they were not human bodies, either one of them; something had vanished; the light of the crystal fixtures in the room was the radiance of X-rays that ate through, not the bones, but deeper; they were souls, he thought, sitting at a dinner table, souls held with evening clothes, lacking the intermediate shape of flesh, terrifying in naked revelation — terrifying, because he expected to see torturers, but saw a great innocence. He wondered what they saw, what his own clothes contained if his physical shape had gone.

"No?" said Wynand. "You don't want to do that, Mr. Keating? But of course you don't have to. Just say that you don't want any of it. I won't mind. There's Mr. Ralston Holcombe across the room. He can build Stoneridge as well as you could."

"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Wynand," whispered Keating. His eyes were fixed upon the tomato aspic on his salad plate; it was soft and shivering; it made him sick.

Wynand turned to Dominique.

"Do you remember our conversation about a certain quest, Mrs. Keating? I said it was a quest at which you would never succeed. Look at your husband. He's an expert — without effort. That is the way to go about it. Match that, sometime. Don't bother to tell me that you can't. I know it. You're an amateur, my dear."

Keating thought that he must speak again, but he couldn't, not as long as that salad was there before him. The terror came from that plate, not from the fastidious monster across the table; the rest of the room was warm and safe. He lurched forward and his elbow swept the plate off the table.

He made a kind of sound expressing regrets. Somebody's shape came up, there were polite voices of apology, and the mess vanished from the carpet.

Keating heard a voice saying: "Why are you doing this?" saw two faces turned to him and knew that he had said it.

"Mr. Wynand is not doing it to torture you, Peter," said Dominique calmly. "He's doing it for me. To see how much I can take."

"That's true, Mrs. Keating," said Wynand. "Partly true. The other part is: to justify myself."

"In whose eyes?"

"Yours. And my own, perhaps."

"Do you need to?"

"Sometimes. The Banner is a contemptible paper, isn't it? Well, I have paid with my honor for the privilege of holding a position where I can amuse myself by observing how honor operates in other men."

His own clothes, thought Keating, contained nothing now, because the two faces did not notice him any longer. He was safe; his place at that table was empty. He wondered, from a great, indifferent distance, why the two were looking at each other quietly, not like enemies, not like fellow executioners, but like comrades.

Two days before they were to sail, Wynand telephoned Dominique late in the evening.

"Could you come over right now?" he asked, and hearing a moment's silence, added: "Oh, not what you're thinking. I live up to my agreements. You'll be quite safe. I just would like to see you tonight."

"All right," she said, and was astonished to hear a quiet: "Thank you."

When the elevator door slid open in the private lobby of his penthouse, he was waiting there, but did not let her step out. He joined her in the elevator.

"I don't want you to enter my house," he said. "We're going to the floor below."

The elevator operator looked at him, amazed.

The car stopped and opened before a locked door. Wynand unlocked it and let her step out first, following her into the art gallery. She remembered that this was the place no outsider ever entered. She said nothing. He offered no explanation.

Four hours she walked silently through the vast rooms, looking at the incredible treasures of beauty. There was a deep carpet and no sound of steps, no sounds from the city outside, no windows. He followed her, stopping when she stopped. His eyes went with hers from object to object. At times his glance moved to her face. She passed, without stopping, by the statue from the Stoddard Temple.

He did not urge her to stay nor to hurry, as if he had turned the place over to her. She decided when she wished to leave, and he followed her to the door. Then she asked:

"Why did you want me to see this? It won't make me think better of you. Worse, perhaps."

"Yes, I'd expect that," he said quietly, "if I had thought of it that way. But I didn't. I just wanted you to see it."

4.

THE SUN had set when they stepped out of the car. In the spread of sky and sea, a green sky over a sheet of mercury, tracings of fire remained at the edges of the clouds and in the brass fittings of the yacht. The yacht was like a white streak of motion, a sensitive body strained against the curb of stillness.

Dominique looked at the gold letters — I Do — on the delicate white bow.

"What does that name mean?" she asked.

"It's an answer," said Wynand, "to people long since dead. Though perhaps they are the only immortal ones. You see, the sentence I heard most often in my childhood was 'You don't run things around here.'"

She remembered hearing that he had never answered this question before. He had answered her at once; he had not seemed conscious of making an exception. She felt a sense of calm in his manner, strange and new to him, an air of quiet finality.

When they went aboard, the yacht started moving, almost as if Wynand's steps on deck had served as contact. He stood at the rail, not touching her, he looked at the long, brown shore that rose and fell against the sky, moving away from them. Then he turned to her. She saw no new recognition in his eyes, no beginning, but only the continuation of a glance — as if he had been looking at her all the time.

When they went below he walked with her into her cabin. He said: "Please let me know if there's anything you wish," and walked out through an inside door. She saw that it led to his bedroom. He closed the door and did not return.

She moved idly across the cabin. A smear of reflection followed her on the lustrous surfaces of the pale satinwood paneling. She stretched out in a low armchair, her ankles crossed, her arms thrown behind her head, and watched the porthole turning from green to a dark blue. She moved her hand, switched on a light; the blue vanished and became a glazed black circle.

The steward announced dinner. Wynand knocked at her door and accompanied her to the dining salon. His manner puzzled her: it was gay, but the sense of calm in the gaiety suggested a peculiar earnestness.

She asked, when they were seated at the table:

"Why did you leave me alone?"

"I thought you might want to be alone."

"To get used to the idea?"

"If you wish to put it that way."

"I was used to it before I came to your office."

"Yes, of course. Forgive me for implying any weakness in you. I know better. By the way, you haven't asked me where we're going."

"That, too, would be weakness."

"True. I'm glad you don't care. Because I never have any definite destination. This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it's only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: Here's one more spot that can't hold me."

"I used to travel a great deal. I always felt just like that. I've been told it's because I'm a hater of mankind."

"You're not foolish enough to believe that, are you?"

"I don't know."

"Surely you've seen through that particular stupidity. I mean the one that claims the pig is the symbol of love for humanity — the creature that accepts anything. As a matter of fact, the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him."

"You mean the person who says that there's some good in the worst of us?"

"I mean the person who has the filthy insolence to claim that he loves equally the man who made that statue of you and the man who makes a Mickey Mouse balloon to sell on street corners. I mean the person who loves the men who prefer the Mickey Mouse to your statue — and there are many of that kind. I mean the person who loves Joan of Arc and the salesgirls in dress shops on Broadway — with an equal fervor. I mean the person who loves your beauty and the women he sees in a subway — the kind that can't cross their knees and show flesh hanging publicly over their garters — with the same sense of exaltation. I mean the person who loves the clean, steady, unfrightened eyes of man looking through a telescope and the white stare of an imbecile — equally, I mean quite a large, generous, magnanimous company. Is it you who hate mankind, Mrs. Keating?"

"You're saying all the things that — since I can remember — since I began to see and think — have been ... " She stopped.

"Have been torturing you. Of course. One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name. It's one or the other. One doesn't love God and sacrilege impartially. Except when one doesn't know that sacrilege has been committed. Because one doesn't know God."

"What will you say if I give you the answer people usually give me — that love is forgiveness?"

"I'll say it's an indecency of which you're not capable — even though you think you're an expert in such matters."

"Or that love is pity."

"Oh, keep still. It's bad enough to hear things like that. To hear them from you is revolting — even as a joke."

"What's your answer?"

"That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don't know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it — the total passion for the total height — you're incapable of anything less."

"As — you and I — know it?"

"It's what we feel when we look at a thing like your statue. There's no forgiveness in that, and no pity. And I'd want to kill the man who claims that there should be. But, you see, when he looks at your statue — he feels nothing. That — or a dog with a broken paw — it's all the same to him. He even feels that he's done something nobler by bandaging the dog's paw than by looking at your statue. So if you seek a glimpse of greatness, if you want exaltation, if you ask for God and refuse to accept the washing of wounds as substitute — you're called a hater of humanity, Mrs. Keating, because you've committed the crime of knowing a love humanity has not learned to deserve."

"Mr. Wynand, have you read what I got fired for?"

"No. I didn't then. I don't dare to now "

"Why?"

He ignored the question. He said, smiling: "And so, you came to me and said 'You're the vilest person on earth — take me so that I'll learn self-contempt. I lack that which most people live by. They find life endurable, while I can't.' Do you see now what you've shown?"

"I didn't expect it to be seen."

"No. Not by the publisher of the New York Banner, of course. That's all right. I expected a beautiful slut who was a friend of Ellsworth Toohey."

They laughed together. She thought it was strange that they could talk without strain — as if he had forgotten the purpose of this journey. His calm had become a contagious sense of peace between them.

She watched the unobtrusively gracious way their dinner was served, she looked at the white tablecloth against the deep red of the mahogany walls. Everything on the yacht had an air that made her think it was the first truly luxurious place she had ever entered: the luxury was secondary, a background so proper to him that it could be ignored. The man humbled his own wealth. She had seen people of wealth, stiff and awed before that which represented their ultimate goal. The splendor of this place was not the aim, not the final achievement of the man who leaned casually across the table. She wondered what his aim had been.

"This ship is becoming to you," she said.

She saw a look of pleasure in his eyes — and of gratitude.

"Thank you ... Is the art gallery?"

"Yes. Only that's less excusable."

"I don't want you to make excuses for me." He said it simply, without reproach.

They had finished dinner. She waited for the inevitable invitation. It did not come. He sat smoking, talking about the yacht and the ocean.

Her hand came to rest accidentally on the tablecloth, close to his. She saw him looking at it. She wanted to jerk her hand away, but forced herself to let it lie still. Now, she thought.

He got up. "Let's go on deck," he said.

They stood at the rail and looked at a black void. Space was not to be seen, only felt by the quality of the air against their faces. A few stars gave reality to the empty sky. A few sparks of white fire in the water gave life to the ocean.

He stood, slouched carelessly, one arm raised, grasping a stanchion. She saw the sparks flowing, forming the edges of waves, framed by the curve of his body. That, too, was becoming to him.

She said:

"May I name another vicious bromide you've never felt?"

"Which one?"

"You've never felt how small you were when looking at the ocean."

He laughed. "Never. Nor looking at the planets. Nor at mountain peaks. Nor at the Grand Canyon. Why should I? When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man, I think of man's magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes."

"Yes. And that particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature — I've never received it from nature, only from ... " She stopped.

"From what?"

"Buildings," she whispered. "Skyscrapers."

"Why didn't you want to say that?"

"I ... don't know."

"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window — no, I don't feel how small I am — but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."

"Gail, I don't know whether I'm listening to you or to myself."

"Did you hear yourself just now?"

She smiled. "Actually not. But I won't take it back, Gail."

"Thank you — Dominique." His voice was soft and amused. "But we weren't talking about you or me. We were talking about other people." He leaned with both forearms on the rail, he spoke watching the sparks in the water. "It's interesting to speculate on the reasons that make men so anxious to debase themselves. As in that idea of feeling small before nature. It's not a bromide, it's practically an institution. Have you noticed how self-righteous a man sounds when he tells you about it? Look, he seems to say, I'm so glad to be a pygmy, that's how virtuous I am. Have you heard with what delight people quote some great celebrity who's proclaimed that he's not so great when he looks at Niagara Falls? It's as if they were smacking their lips in sheer glee that their best is dust before the brute force of an earthquake. As if they were sprawling on all fours, rubbing their foreheads in the mud to the majesty of a hurricane. But that's not the spirit that leashed fire, steam, electricity, that crossed oceans in sailing sloops, that built airplanes and dams ... and skyscrapers. What is it they fear? What is they hate so much, those who love to crawl? And why?"

"When I find the answer to that," she said, "I'll make my peace with the world."

He went on talking — of his travels, of the continents beyond the darkness around them, the darkness that made of space a soft curtain pressed against their eyelids. She waited. She stopped answering. She gave him a chance to use the brief silences for ending this, for saying the words she expected. He would not say them.

"Are you tired, my dear?" he asked.

"No."

"I'll get you a deck chair, if you want to sit down."

"No. I like standing here."

"It's a little cold. But by tomorrow we'll be far south and then you'll see the ocean on fire, at night. It's very beautiful."

He was silent. She heard the ship's speed in the sound of the water, the rustling moan of protest against the thing that cut a long wound across the water's surface.

"When are we going below?" she asked.

"We're not going below."

He had said it quietly, with an odd kind of simplicity, as if he were standing helpless before a fact he could not alter.

"Will you marry me?" he asked.

She could not hide the shock; he had seen it in advance, he was smiling quietly, understanding.

"It would be best to say nothing else." He spoke carefully. "But you prefer to hear it stated — because that kind of silence between us is more than I have a right to expect. You don't want to tell me much, but I've spoken for you tonight, so let me speak for you again. You've chosen me as the symbol of your contempt for men. You don't love me. You wish to grant me nothing. I'm only your tool of self-destruction I know all that, I accept it and I want you to marry me. If you wish to commit an unspeakable act as your revenge against the world, such an act is not to sell yourself to your enemy, but to marry him. Not to match your worst against his worst, but your worst against his best. You've tried that once, but your victim wasn't worthy of your purpose. You see, I'm pleading my case on your own terms. What mine are, what I want to find in that marriage is of no importance to you and I shall regard it in that manner. You don't have to know about it. You don't have to consider it. I exact no promises and impose no obligations on you. You'll be free to leave me whenever you wish. Incidentally — since it is of no concern to you — I love you."

She stood, one arm stretched behind her, fingertips pressed to the rail. She said:

"I did not want that."

"I know. But if you're curious about it, I'll tell you that you've made a mistake. You let me see the cleanest person I've ever seen."

"Isn't that ridiculous, after the way we met?"

"Dominique, I've spent my life pulling the strings of the world. I've seen all of it. Do you think I could believe any purity — unless it came to me twisted in some such dreadful shape as the one you chose? But what I feel must not affect your decision."

She stood looking at him, looking incredulously at all the hours past. Her mouth had the shape of gentleness. He saw it. She thought that every word he said today had been of her language, that this offer and the form he gave it were of her own world — and that he had destroyed his purpose by it, taken away from her the motive he suggested, made it impossible to seek degradation with a man who spoke as he did. She wanted suddenly to reach for him, to tell him everything, to find a moment's release in his understanding, then ask him never to see her again.

Then she remembered.

He noticed the movement of her hand. Her fingers were not clinging tensely against the rail, betraying a need of support, giving importance to the moment; they relaxed and closed about the rail; as if she had taken hold of some reins, carelessly, because the occasion required no earnest effort any longer.

She remembered the Stoddard Temple. She thought of the man before her, who spoke about the total passion for the total height and about protecting skyscrapers with his body — and she saw a picture on a page of the New York Banner, the picture of Howard Roark looking up at the Enright House, and the caption: "Are you happy, Mr. Superman?"

She raised her face to him. She asked:

"To marry you? To become Mrs. Wynand-Papers?"

She heard the effort in his voice as he answered: "If you wish to call it that — yes."

"I will marry you."

"Thank you, Dominique."

She waited indifferently.

When he turned to her, he spoke as he had spoken all day, a calm voice with an edge of gaiety.

"We'll cut the cruise short. We'll take just a week — I want to have you here for a while. You'll leave for Reno the day after we return. I'll take care of your husband. He can have Stoneridge and anything else he wants and may God damn him. We'll be married the day you come back."

"Yes, Gail. Now let's go below."

"Do you want it?"

"No. But I don't want our marriage to be important."

"I want it to be important, Dominique. That's why I won't touch you tonight. Not until we're married. I know it's a senseless gesture. I know that a wedding ceremony has no significance for either one of us. But to be conventional is the only abnormality possible between us. That's why I want it. I have no other way of making an exception."

"As you wish, Gail."

Then he pulled her to him and he kissed her mouth. It was the completion of his words, the finished statement, a statement of such intensity that she tried to stiffen her body, not to respond, and felt her body responding, forced to forget everything but the physical fact of a man who held her.

He let her go. She knew he had noticed. He smiled and said:

"You're tired, Dominique. Shall I say good night? I want to remain here for a while."

She turned obediently and walked alone down to her cabin.

5.

"WHAT'S the matter? Don't I get Stoneridge?" snapped Peter Keating.

Dominique walked into the living room. He followed, waiting in the open door. The elevator boy brought in her luggage, and left. She said, removing her gloves:

"You'll get Stoneridge, Peter. Mr. Wynand will tell you the rest himself. He wants to see you tonight. At eight-thirty. At his home."

"Why in hell?"

"He'll tell you."

She slapped her gloves softly against her palm, a small gesture of finality, like a period at the end of a sentence. She turned to leave the room. He stood in her way.

"I don't care," he said. "I don't give a damn. I can play it your way. You're great, aren't you? — because you act like truck drivers, you and Mr. Gail Wynand? To hell with decency, to hell with the other fellow's feelings? Well, I can do that too. I'll use you both and I'll get what I can out of it — and that's all I care. How do you like it? No point when the worm refuses to be hurt? Spoils the fun?"

"I think that's much better, Peter. I'm glad." He found himself unable to preserve this attitude when he entered Wynand's study that evening. He could not escape the awe of being admitted into Gail Wynand's home. By the time he crossed the room to the seat facing the desk he felt nothing but a sense of weight, and he wondered whether his feet had left prints on the soft carpet; like the leaded feet of a deep-sea diver. "What I have to tell you, Mr. Keating, should never have needed to be said or done," said Wynand. Keating had never heard a man speak in a manner so consciously controlled. He thought crazily that it sounded as if Wynand held his fist closed over his voice and directed each syllable. "Any extra word I speak will be offensive, so I shall be brief. I am going to marry your wife. She is leaving for Reno tomorrow. Here is the contract for Stoneridge. I have signed it. Attached is a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It is in addition to what you will receive for your work under the contract. I'll appreciate it if you will now make no comment of any kind. I realize that I could have had your consent for less, but I wish no discussion. It would be intolerable if we were to bargain about it. Therefore, will you please take this and consider the matter settled?"

He extended the contract across the desk. Keating saw the pale blue rectangle of the check held to the top of the page by a paper clip. The clip flashed silver in the light of the desk lamp.

Keating's hand did not reach to meet the paper. He said, his chin moving awkwardly to frame the words: "I don't want it. You can have my consent for nothing." He saw a look of astonishment — and almost of kindness — on Wynand's face.

"You don't want it? You don't want Stoneridge either?"

"I want Stoneridge!" Keating's hand rose and snatched the paper. "I want it all! Why should you get away with it? Why should I care?"

Wynand got up. He said, relief and regret in his voice: "Right, Mr. Keating. For a moment, you had almost justified your marriage. Let it remain what it was. Good night."

Keating did not go home. He walked to the apartment of Neil Dumont, his new designer and best friend. Neil Dumont was a lanky, anemic society youth, with shoulders stooped under the burden of too many illustrious ancestors. He was not a good designer, but he had connections; he was obsequious to Keating in the office, and Keating was obsequious to him after office hours.

He found Dumont at home. Together, they got Gordon Prescott and Vincent Knowlton, and started out to make a wild night of it. Keating did not drink much. He paid for everything. He paid more than necessary. He seemed anxious to find things to pay for. He gave exorbitant tips. He kept asking: "We're friends — aren't we friends? — aren't we?" He looked at the glasses around him and he watched the lights dancing in the liquid. He looked at the three pairs of eyes; they were blurred, but they turned upon him occasionally with contentment. They were soft and comforting.

That evening, her bags packed and ready in her room, Dominique went to see Steven Mallory.

She had not seen Roark for twenty months. She had called on Mallory once in a while. Mallory knew that these visits were breakdowns in a struggle she would not name; he knew that she did not want to come, that her rare evenings with him were time torn out of her life. He never asked any questions and he was always glad to see her. They talked quietly, with a feeling of companionship such as that of an old married couple; as if he had possessed her body, and the wonder of it had long since been consumed, and nothing remained but an untroubled intimacy. He had never touched her body, but he had possessed it in a deeper kind of ownership when he had done her statue, and they could not lose the special sense of each other it had given them.

He smiled when he opened the door and saw her.

"Hello, Dominique."

"Hello, Steve. Interrupting you?"

"No. Come in."

He had a studio, a huge, sloppy place in an old building. She noticed the change since her last visit. The room had an air of laughter, like a breath held too long and released. She saw second-hand furniture, an Oriental rug of rare texture and sensuous color, jade ash trays, pieces of sculpture that came from historical excavations, anything he had wished to seize, helped by the sudden fortune of Wynand's patronage. The walls looked strangely bare above the gay clutter. He had bought no paintings. A single sketch hung over his studio — Roark's original drawing of the Stoddard Temple.

She looked slowly about her, noting every object and the reason for its presence. He kicked two chairs toward the fireplace and they sat down, one at each side of the fire.

He said, quite simply:

"Clayton, Ohio."

"Doing what?"

"A new building for Janer's Department Store. Five stories. On Main Street."

"How long has he been there?"

"About a month."

It was the first question he answered whenever she came here, without making her ask it. His simple ease spared her the necessity of explanation or pretense; his manner included no comment.

"I'm going away tomorrow, Steve."

"For long?"

"Six weeks. Reno."

"I'm glad."

"I'd rather not tell you now what I'll do when I come back. You won't be glad."

"I'll try to be — if it's what you want to do."

"It's what I want to do."

One log still kept its shape on the pile of coals in the fireplace; it was checkered into small squares and it glowed without flame, like a solid string of lighted windows. He reached down and threw a fresh log on the coals. It cracked the string of windows in half and sent sparks shooting up against the sooted bricks.

He talked about his own work. She listened, as if she were an emigrant hearing her homeland's language for a brief while.

In a pause, she asked:

"How is he, Steve?"

"As he's always been. He doesn't change, you know."

He kicked the log. A few coals rolled out. He pushed them back. He said:

"I often think that he's the only one of us who's achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean that he won't die some day. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they're not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict — and they call it growth. At the end there's nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard — one can imagine him existing forever."

She sat looking at the fire. It gave a deceptive semblance of life to her face. After a while he asked: "How do you like all the new things I got?"

"I like them. I like your having them."

"I didn't tell you what happened to me since I saw you last. The completely incredible. Gail Wynand ... "

"Yes, I know about that."

"You do? Wynand, of all people — what on earth made him discover me?"

"I know that too. I'll tell you when I come back."

"He has an amazing judgment. Amazing for him. He bought the best."

"Yes, he would."

Then she asked, without transition, yet he knew that she was not speaking of Wynand:

"Steve, has he ever asked you about me?"

"No."

"Have you told him about my coming here?"

"No."

"Is that — for my sake, Steve?"

"No. For his."

He knew he had told her everything she wanted to know.

She said, rising:

"Let's have some tea. Show me where you keep your stuff. I'll fix it."

Dominique left for Reno early in the morning. Keating was still asleep and she did not awaken him to say good-bye.

When he opened his eyes, he knew that she was gone, before he looked at the clock, by the quality of the silence in the house. He thought he should say "Good riddance," but he did not say it and he did not feel it. What he felt was a vast, flat sentence without subject — "It's no use" — related neither to himself nor to Dominique. He was alone and there was no necessity to pretend anything. He lay in bed, on his back, his arms flung out helplessly. His face looked humble and his eyes bewildered. He felt that it was an end and a death, but he did not mean the loss of Dominique.

He got up and dressed. In the bathroom he found a hand towel she had used and discarded. He picked it up, he pressed his face to it and held it for a long time, not in sorrow, but in nameless emotion, not understanding, knowing only that he had loved her twice — on that evening when Toohey telephoned, and now. Then he opened his fingers and let the towel slip down to the floor, like a liquid running between his fingers.

He went to his office and worked as usual. Nobody knew of his divorce and he felt no desire to inform anyone. Neil Dumont winked at him and drawled: "I say, Pete, you look peaked." He shrugged and turned his back. The sight of Dumont made him sick today.

He left the office early. A vague instinct kept pulling at him, like hunger, at first, then taking shape. He had to see Ellsworth Toohey. He had to reach Toohey. He felt like the survivor of a shipwreck swimming toward a distant light.

That evening he dragged himself to Ellsworth Toohey's apartment. When he entered, he felt dimly glad of his self-control, because Toohey seemed to notice nothing in his face.

"Oh, hello, Peter," said Toohey airily. "Your sense of timing leaves much to be desired. You catch me on the worst possible evening. Busy as all hell. But don't let that bother you. What are friends for but to inconvenience one? Sit down, sit down, I'll be with you in a minute."

"I'm sorry, Ellsworth. But ... I had to."

"Make yourself at home. Just ignore me for a minute, will you?"

Keating sat down and waited. Toohey worked, making notes on sheets of typewritten copy. He sharpened a pencil, the sound grating like a saw across Keating's nerves. He bent over his copy again, rustling the pages once in a while.

Half an hour later he pushed the papers aside and smiled at Keating. "That's that," he said. Keating made a small movement forward. "Sit tight," said Toohey, "just one telephone call I've got to make."

He dialed the number of Gus Webb. "Hello, Gus," he said gaily. "How are you, you walking advertisement for contraceptives?" Keating had never heard that tone of loose intimacy from Toohey, a special tone of brotherhood that permitted sloppiness. He heard Webb's piercing voice say something and laugh in the receiver. The receiver went on spitting out rapid sounds from deep down in its tube, like a throat being cleared. The words could not be recognized, only their quality; the quality of abandon and insolence, with high shrieks of mirth once in a while.

Toohey leaned back in his chair, listening, half smiling. "Yes," he said occasionally, "uh-huh ... You said it, boy ... Surer'n hell ... " He leaned back farther and put one foot in a shining, pointed shoe on the edge of the desk. "Listen, boy, what I wanted to tell you is go easy on old Bassett for a while. Sure he likes your work, but don't shock hell out of him for the time being. No roughhouse, see? Keep that big facial cavity of yours buttoned up ... You know damn well who I am to tell you ... That's right ... That's the stuff, kid ... Oh, he did? Good, angel-face ... Well, bye-bye — oh, say, Gus, have you heard the one about the British lady and the plumber?" There followed a story. The receiver yelled raucously at the end. "Well, watch your step and your digestion, angel-face. Nighty-night."

Toohey dropped the receiver, said: "Now, Peter," stretched, got up, walking to Keating and stood before him, rocking a little on his small feet, his eyes bright and kindly.

"Now, Peter, what's the matter? Has the world crashed about your nose?"

Keating reached into his inside pocket and produced a yellow check, crumpled, much handled. It bore his signature and the sum of ten thousand dollars, made out to Ellsworth M. Toohey. The gesture with which he handed it to Toohey was not that of a donor, but of a beggar.

"Please, Ellsworth ... here ... take this ... for a good cause ... for the Workshop of Social Study ... or for anything you wish ... you know best ... for a good cause ... "

Toohey held the check with the tips of his fingers, like a soiled penny, bent his head to one side, pursing his lips in appreciation, and tossed the check on his desk.

"Very handsome of you, Peter. Very handsome indeed. What's the occasion?"

"Ellsworth, you remember what you said once — that it doesn't matter what we are or do, if we help others? That's all that counts? That's good, isn't it? That's clean?"

"I haven't said it once. I've said it a million times."

"And it's really true?"

"Of course it's true. If you have the courage to accept it."

"You're my friend, aren't you? You're the only friend I've got. I ... I'm not even friendly with myself, but you are. With me, I mean, aren't you, Ellsworth?"

"But of course. Which is of more value than your own friendship with yourself — a rather queer conception, but quite valid."

"You understand. Nobody else does. And you like me."

"Devotedly. Whenever I have the time."

"Ah?"

"Your sense of humor, Peter, where's your sense of humor? What's the matter? A bellyache? Or a soul-indigestion?"

"Ellsworth, I ... "

"Yes?"

"I can't tell you. Even you."

"You're a coward, Peter."

Keating stared helplessly: the voice had been severe and gentle, he did not know whether he should feel pain, insult or confidence.

"You come here to tell me that it doesn't matter what you do — and then you go to pieces over something or other you've done. Come on, be a man and say it doesn't matter. Say you're not important. Mean it. Show some guts. Forget your little ego."

"I'm not important, Ellsworth. I'm not important. Oh God, if only everybody'd say it like you do! I'm not important. I don't want to be important."

"Where did that money come from?"

"I sold Dominique."

"What are you talking about? The cruise?"

"Only it seems as if it's not Dominique that I sold."

"What do you care if ... "

"She's gone to Reno."

"What?"

He could not understand the violence of Toohey's reaction, but he was too tired to wonder. He told everything, as it had happened to him; it had not taken long to happen or to tell.

"You damn fool! You shouldn't have allowed it."

"What could I do? Against Wynand?"

"But to let him marry her!"

"Why not, Ellsworth? It's better than ... "

"I didn't think he'd ever ... but ... Oh, God damn it, I'm a bigger fool than you are!"

"But it's better for Dominique if ... "

"To hell with your Dominique! It's Wynand I'm thinking about!"

"Ellsworth, what's the matter with you? ... Why should you care?"

"Keep still, will you? Let me think."

In a moment, Toohey shrugged, sat down beside Keating and slipped his arm about his shoulders.

"I'm sorry, Peter," he said. "I apologize. I've been inexcusably rude to you. It was just the shock. But I understand how you feel. Only you mustn't take it too seriously. It doesn't matter." He spoke automatically. His mind was far away. Keating did not notice that. He heard the words. They were the spring in the desert. "It doesn't matter. You're only human. That's all you want to be. Who's any better? Who has the right to cast the first stone? We're all human. It doesn't matter."

"My God!" said Alvah Scarret. "He can't! Not Dominique Francon!"

"He will," said Toohey. "As soon as she returns."

Scarret had been surprised that Toohey should invite him to lunch, but the news he heard wiped out the surprise in a greater and more painful one.

"I'm fond of Dominique," said Scarret, pushing his plate aside, his appetite gone. "I've always been very fond of her. But to have her as Mrs. Gail Wynand!"

"These, exactly, are my own sentiments," said Toohey.

"I've always advised him to marry. It helps. Lends an air. An insurance of respectability, sort of, and he could do with one. He's always skated on pretty thin ice. Got away with it, so far. But Dominique!"

"Why do you find such a marriage unsuitable?"

"Well ... well, it's not ... Damn it, you know it's not right!"

"I know it. Do you?"

"Look, she's a dangerous kind of woman."

"She is. That's your minor premise. Your major premise, however, is: he's a dangerous kind of man."

"Well ... in some ways ... yes."

"My esteemed editor, you understand me quite well. But there are times when it's helpful to formulate things. It tends toward future-co-operation. You and I have a great deal in common-though you have been somewhat reluctant to admit it. We are two variations on the same theme, shall we say? Or we play two ends against the same middle, if you prefer your own literary style. But our dear boss is quite another tune. A different leitmotif entirely-don't you think so, Alvah? Our dear boss is an accident in our midst. Accidents are unreliable phenomena. You've been sitting on the edge of your seat for years-haven't you?-watching Mr. Gail Wynand. So you know exactly what I'm talking about. You know also that Miss Dominique Francon is not our tune either. And you do not wish to see that particular influence enter the life of our boss. Do I have to state the issue any plainer?"

"You're a smart man, Ellsworth," said Scarret heavily.

"That's been obvious for years."

"I'll talk to him. You'd better not-he hates your guts, if you'll excuse me. But I don't think I'd do much good either. Not if he's made up his mind."

"I don't expect you to. You may try, if you wish, though it's useless. We can't stop that marriage. One of my good points is the fact that I admit defeat when it has to be admitted."

"But then, why did you — "

"Tell you this? In the nature of a scoop, Alvah. Advance information."

"I appreciate it, Ellsworth. I sure do."

"It would be wise to go on appreciating it. The Wynand papers, Alvah, are not to be given up easily. In unity there is strength. Your style."

"What do you mean?"

"Only that we're in for a difficult time, my friend. So we'd do better to stick together."

"Why, I'm with you, Ellsworth. I've always been."

"Inaccurate, but we'll let it pass. We're concerned only with the present. And the future. As a token of mutual understanding, how about getting rid of Jimmy Kearns at the first opportunity?"

"I thought you've been driving at that for months! What's the matter with Jimmy Kearns? He's a bright kid. The best drama critic in town. He's got a mind. Smart as a whip. Most promising."

"He's got a mind — of his own. I don't think you want any whips around the place — except the one you hold. I think you want to be careful about what the promise promises."

"Whom'll I stick in his spot?"

"Jules Fougler."

"Oh, hell, Ellsworth!"

"Why not?"

"That old son of a ... We can't afford him."

"You can if you want to. And look at the name he's got."

"But he's the most impossible old ... "

"Well, you don't have to take him. We'll discuss it some other time. Just get rid of Jimmy Kearns."

"Look, Ellsworth, I don't play favorites; it's all the same to me. I'll give Jimmy the boot if you say so. Only I don't see what difference it makes and what it's got to do with what we were talking about."

"You don't," said Toohey. "You will."

"Gail, you know that I want you to be happy," said Alvah Scarret, sitting in a comfortable armchair in the study of Wynand's penthouse that evening. "You know that. I'm thinking of nothing else."

Wynand lay stretched out on a couch, one leg bent, with the foot resting on the knee of the other. He smoked and listened silently.

"I've known Dominique for years," said Scarret. "Long before you ever heard of her. I love her. I love her, you might say, like a father. But you've got to admit that she's not the kind of woman your public would expect to see as Mrs. Gail Wynand."

Wynand said nothing.

"Your wife is a public figure, Gail. Just automatically. A public property. Your readers have a right to demand and expect certain things of her. A symbol value, if you know what I mean. Like the Queen of England, sort of. How do you expect Dominique to live up to that? How do you expect her to preserve any appearances at all? She's the wildest person I know. She has a terrible reputation. But worst of all — think Gail! — a divorcee! And here we spend tons of good print, standing for the sanctity of the home and the purity of womanhood! How are you going to make your public swallow that one? How am I going to sell your wife to them?"

"Don't you think this conversation had better be stopped, Alvah?"

"Yes, Gail," said Scarret meekly.

Scarret waited, with a heavy sense of aftermath, as if after a violent quarrel, anxious to make up.

"I know, Gail!" he cried happily. "I know what we can do. We'll put Dominique back on the paper and we'll have her write a column — a different one — a syndicated column on the home. You know, household hints, kitchen, babies and all that. It'll take the curse off. Show what a good little homebody she really is, her youthful mistakes notwithstanding. Make the women forgive her. We'll have a special department — 'Mrs. Gail Wynand's recipes.' A few pictures of her will help — you know, gingham dresses and aprons and her hair done up in a more conventional way."

"Shut up, Alvah, before I slap your face," said Wynand without raising his voice.

"Yes, Gail."

Scarret made a move to get up.

"Sit still. I haven't finished."

Scarret waited obediently.

"Tomorrow morning," said Wynand, "you will send a memo to every one of our papers. You will tell them to look through their files and find any pictures of Dominique Francon they might have in connection with her old column. You will tell them to destroy the pictures. You will tell them that henceforward any mention of her name or the use of her picture in any of my papers will cost the job of the entire editorial staff responsible. When the proper time comes, you will have an announcement of my marriage appear in all our papers. That cannot be avoided. The briefest announcement you can compose. No commentaries. No stories. No pictures. Pass the word around and make sure it's understood. It's any man's job, yours included, if this is disobeyed."

"No stories — when you marry her?"

"No stories, Alvah."

"But good God! That's news! The other papers ... "

"I don't care what the other papers do about it."

"But — why, Gail?"

"You wouldn't understand."

Dominique sat at the window, listening to the train wheels under the floor. She looked at the countryside of Ohio flying past in the fading daylight. Her head lay back against the seat and her hands lay limply at each side of her on the seat cushion. She was one with the structure of the car, she was carried forward just as the window frame, the floor, the walls of the compartment were carried forward. The corners blurred, gathering darkness; the window remained luminous, evening light rising from the earth. She let herself rest in that faint illumination; it entered the car and ruled it, so long as she did not turn on the light to shut it out.

She had no consciousness of purpose. There was no goal to this journey, only the journey itself, only the motion and the metal sound of motion around her. She felt slack and empty, losing her identity in a painless ebb, content to vanish and let nothing remain defined save that particular earth in the window.

When she saw, in the slowing movement beyond the glass, the name "Clayton" on a faded board under the eaves of a station building, she knew what she had been expecting. She knew why she had taken this train, not a faster one, why she had looked carefully at the timetable of its stops — although it had been just a column of meaningless names to her then. She seized her suitcase, coat and hat. She ran. She could not take time to dress, afraid that the floor under her feet would carry her away from here. She ran down the narrow corridor of the car, down the steps. She leaped to the station platform, feeling the shock of winter cold on her bare throat. She stood looking at the station building. She heard the train moving behind her, clattering away.

Then she put on her coat and hat. She walked across the platform, into the waiting room, across a wooden floor studded with lumps of dry chewing gum, through the heavy billows of heat from an iron stove, to the square beyond the station.

She saw a last band of yellow in the sky above the low roof lines. She saw a pitted stretch of paving bricks, and small houses leaning against one another; a bare tree with twisted branches, skeletons of weeds at the doorless opening of an abandoned garage, dark shop fronts, a drugstore still open on a corner, its lighted window dim, low over the ground.

She had never been here before, but she felt this place proclaiming its ownership of her, closing in about her with ominous intimacy. It was as if every dark mass exercised a suction like the pull of the planets in space, prescribing her orbit. She put her hand on a fire hydrant and felt the cold seeping through her glove into her skin. This was the way the town told her, a direct penetration which neither her clothes nor her mind could stop. The peace of the inevitable remained. Only now she had to act, but the actions were simple, set in advance. She asked a passer-by: "Where is the site of the new building of Janer's Department Store?"

She walked patiently through the dark streets. She walked past desolate winter lawns and sagging porches; past vacant lots where weeds rustled against tin cans; past closed grocery stores and a steaming laundry; past an uncurtained window where a man in shirt sleeves sat by a fire, reading a paper. She turned corners and crossed streets, with the feel of cobblestones under the thin soles of her pumps. Rare passersby looked, astonished, at her air of foreign elegance. She noticed it; she felt an answering wonder. She wanted to say: But don't you understand? — I belong here more than you do. She stopped, once in a while, closing her eyes; she found it difficult to breathe.

She came to Main Street and walked slower. There were a few lights, cars parked diagonally at the curb, a movie theater, a store window displaying pink underwear among kitchen utensils. She walked stiffly, looking ahead.

She saw a glare of light on the side of an old building, on a blind wall of yellow bricks showing the sooted floor lines of the neighboring structure that had been torn down. The light came from an excavation pit. She knew this was the site. She hoped it was not. If they worked late, he would be here. She did not want to see him tonight. She had wanted only to see the place and the building; she was not ready for more; she had wanted to see him tomorrow. But she could not stop now. She walked to the excavation. It lay on a corner, open to the street, without fence. She heard the grinding clatter of iron, she saw the arm of a derrick, the shadows of men on the slanting sides of fresh earth, yellow in the light. She could not see the planks that led up to the sidewalk, but she heard the sound of steps and then she saw Roark coming up to the street. He was hatless, he had a loose coat hanging open.

He stopped. He looked at her. She thought that she was standing straight; that it was simple and normal, she was seeing the gray eyes and the orange hair as she had always seen them. She was astonished that he moved toward her with a kind of urgent haste, that his hand closed over her elbow too firmly and he said: "You'd better sit down."

Then she saw she could not have stood up without that hand on her elbow. He took her suitcase. He led her across the dark side street and made her sit down on the steps of a vacant house. She leaned back against a closed door. He sat down beside her. He kept his hand tight on her elbow, not a caress, but an impersonal hold of control over both of them.

After a while he dropped his hand. She knew that she was safe now. She could speak.

"That's your new building?"

"Yes. You walked here from the station?"

"Yes."

"It's a long walk."

"I think it was."

She thought that they had not greeted each other and that it was right. This was not a reunion, but just one moment out of something that had never been interrupted. She thought how strange it would be if she ever said "Hello" to him; one did not greet oneself each morning.

"What time did you get up today?" she asked.

"At seven."

"I was in New York then. In a cab, going to Grand Central. Where did you have breakfast?"

"In a lunch wagon."

"The kind that stays open all night?"

"Yes. Mostly for truck drivers."

"Do you go there often?"

"Whenever I want a cup of coffee."

"And you sit at a counter? And there are people around, looking at you?"

"I sit at a counter when I have the time. There are people around. I don't think they look at me much."

"And afterward? You walk to work?"

"Yes."

"You walk every day? Down any of these streets? Past any window? So that if one just wanted to reach and open the window ... "

"People don't stare out of windows here."

From the vantage of the high stoop they could see the excavation across the street, the earth, the workmen, the rising steel columns in a glare of harsh light. She thought it was strange to see fresh earth in the midst of pavement and cobblestones; as if a piece had been torn from the clothing of a town, showing naked flesh. She said:

"You've done two country homes in the last two years."

"Yes. One in Pennsylvania and one near Boston."

"They were unimportant houses."

"Inexpensive, if that's what you mean. But very interesting to do."

"How long will you remain here?"

"Another month."

"Why do you work at night?"

"It's a rush job."

Across the street the derrick was moving, balancing a long girder in the air. She saw him watching it, and she knew he was not thinking of it, but there was the instinctive response in his eyes, something physically personal, intimacy with any action taken for his building.

"Roark ... "

They had not pronounced each other's names. It had the sensuous pleasure of a surrender long delayed — to pronounce the name and to have him hear it.

"Roark, it's the quarry again."

He smiled. "If you wish. Only it isn't."

"After the Enright House? After the Cord Building?"

"I don't think of it that way."

"How do you think of it?"

"I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable."

He was looking across the street. He had not changed. There was the old sense of lightness in him, of ease in motion, in action, in thought. She said, her sentence without beginning or end:

" ... doing five-story buildings for the rest of your life ... "

"If necessary. But I don't think it will be like that."

"What are you waiting for?"

"I'm not waiting."

She closed her eyes, but she could not hide her mouth; her mouth held bitterness, anger and pain.

"Roark, if you'd been in the city, I wouldn't have come to see you."

"I know it."

"But it was you — in another place — in some nameless hole of a place like this. I had to see it. I had to see the place."

"When are you going back?"

"You know I haven't come to remain?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"You're still afraid of lunch wagons and windows."

"I'm not going back to New York. Not at once."

"No?"

"You haven't asked me anything, Roark. Only whether I walked from the station."

"What do you want me to ask you?"

"I got off the train when I saw the name of the station," she said, her voice dull. "I didn't intend coming here. I was on my way to Reno."

"And after that?"

"I will marry again."

"Do I know your fiancé?"

"You've heard of him. His name is Gail Wynand."

She saw his eyes. She thought she should want to laugh; she had brought him at last to a shock she had never expected to achieve. But she did not laugh. He thought of Henry Cameron; of Cameron saying: I have no answer to give them, Howard. I'm leaving you to face them. You'll answer them. All of them, the Wynand papers and what makes the Wynand papers possible and what lies behind that.

"Roark."

He didn't answer.

"That's worse than Peter Keating, isn't it?" she asked.

"Much worse."

"Do you want to stop me?"

"No."

He had not touched her since he had released her elbow, and that had been only a touch proper in an ambulance. She moved her hand and let it rest against his. He did not withdraw his fingers and he did not pretend indifference. She bent over, holding his hand, not raising it from his knee, and she pressed her lips to his hand. Her hat fell off, he saw the blond head at his knees, he felt her mouth kissing his hand again and again. His fingers held hers, answering, but that was the only answer.

She raised her head and looked at the street. A lighted window hung in the distance, behind a grillwork of bare branches. Small houses stretched off into the darkness, and trees stood by the narrow sidewalks.

She noticed her hat on the steps below and bent to pick it up. She leaned with her bare hand flat against the steps. The stone was old, worn smooth, icy. She felt comfort in the touch. She sat for a moment, bent over, palm pressed to the stone; to feel these steps — no matter how many feet had used them — to feel them as she had felt the fire hydrant.

"Roark, where do you live?"

"In a rooming house."

"What kind of a room?"

"Just a room."

"What's in it? What kind of walls?"

"Some sort of wallpaper. Faded."

"What furniture?"

"A table, chairs, a bed."

"No, tell me in detail."

"There's a clothes closet, then a chest of drawers, the bed in the corner by the window, a large table at the other side — "

"By the wall?"

"No, I put it across the corner, to the window — I work there. Then there's a straight chair, an armchair with a bridge lamp and a magazine rack I never use. I think that's all."

"No rugs? Or curtains?"

"I think there's something at the window and some kind of rug. The floor is nicely polished, it's beautiful old wood."

"I want to think of your room tonight — on the train."

He sat looking across the street. She said:

"Roark, let me stay with you tonight."

"No."

She let her glance follow his to the grinding machinery below. After a while she asked:

"How did you get this store to design?"

"The owner saw my buildings in New York and liked them."

A man in overalls stepped out of the excavation pit, peered into the darkness at them and called: "Is that you up there, boss?"

"Yes," Roark called back.

"Come here a minute, will you?"

Roark walked to him across the street. She could not hear their conversation, but she heard Roark saying gaily: "That's easy," and then they both walked down the planks to the bottom. The man stood talking, pointing up, explaining. Roark threw his head back, to glance up at the rising steel frame; the light was full on his face, and she saw his look of concentration, not a smile, but an expression that gave her a joyous feeling of competence, of disciplined reason in action. He bent, picked up a piece of board, took a pencil from his pocket. He stood with one foot on a pile of planks, the board propped on his knee, and drew rapidly, explaining something to the man who nodded, pleased. She could not hear the words, but she felt the quality of Roark's relation to that man, to all the other men in that pit, an odd sense of loyalty and of brotherhood, but not the kind she had ever heard named by these words. He finished, handed the board to the man, and they both laughed at something. Then he came back and sat down on the steps beside her.

"Roark," she said. "I want to remain here with you for all the years we might have."

He looked at her, attentively, waiting.

"I want to live here." Her voice had the sound of pressure against a dam. "I want to live as you live. Not to touch my money — I'll give it away, to anyone, to Steve Mallory, if you wish, or to one of Toohey's organizations, it doesn't matter. We'll take a house here — like one of these — and I'll keep it for you — don't laugh, I can — I'll cook, I'll wash your clothes, I'll scrub the floor. And you'll give up architecture."

He had not laughed. She saw nothing but an unmoving attention prepared to listen on.

"Roark, try to understand, please try to understand. I can't bear to see what they're doing to you, what they're going to do. It's too great — you and building and what you feel about it. You can't go on like that for long. It won't last. They won't let you. You're moving to some terrible kind of disaster. It can't end any other way. Give it up. Take some meaningless job — like the quarry. We'll live here. We'll have little and we'll give nothing. We'll live only for what we are and for what we know."

He laughed. She heard, in the sound of it, a surprising touch of consideration for her — the attempt not to laugh; but he couldn't stop it.

"Dominique." The way he pronounced the name remained with her and made it easier to hear the words that followed: "I wish I could tell you that it was a temptation, at least for a moment. But it wasn't." He added: "If I were very cruel, I'd accept it. Just to see how soon you'd beg me to go back to building."

"Yes ... Probably ... "

"Marry Wynand and stay married to him. It will be better than what you're doing to yourself right now."

"Do you mind ... if we just sit here for a little while longer ... and not talk about that ... but just talk, as if everything were right ... just an armistice for half an hour out of years ... Tell me what you've done every day you've been here, everything you can remember ... "

Then they talked, as if the stoop of the vacant house were an airplane hanging in space, without sight of earth or sky; he did not look across the street.

Then he glanced at his wrist watch and said:

"There's a train for the West in an hour. Shall I go with you to the station?"

"Do you mind if we walk there?"

"All right."

She stood up. She asked:

"Until — when, Roark?"

His hand moved over the streets. "Until you stop hating all this, stop being afraid of it, learn not to notice it."

They walked together to the station. She listened to the sound of his steps with hers in the empty streets. She let her glance drag along the walls they passed, like a clinging touch. She loved this place, this town and everything that was part of it.

They were walking past a vacant lot. The wind blew an old sheet of newspaper against her legs. It clung to her with a tight insistence that seemed conscious, like the peremptory caress of a cat. She thought, anything of this town had that intimate right to her. She bent, picked up the paper and began folding it, to keep it

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Something to read on the train," she said stupidly.

He snatched the paper from her, crumpled it and flung it away into the weeds. She said nothing and they walked on.

A single light bulb hung over the empty station platform. They waited. He stood looking up the tracks, where the train was to appear. When the tracks rang, shuddering, when the white ball of a headlight spurted out of the distance and stood still in the sky, not approaching, only widening, growing in furious speed, he did not move or turn to her. The rushing beam flung his shadow across the platform, made it sweep over the planks and vanish. For an instant she saw the tall, straight line of his body against the glare. The engine passed them and the car rattled, slowing down. He looked at the windows rolling past. She could not see his face, only the outline of his cheekbone.

When the train stopped, he turned to her. They did not shake hands, they did not speak. They stood straight, facing each other for a moment, as if at attention; it was almost like a military salute. Then she picked up her suitcase and went aboard the train. The train started moving a minute later.

6.

"CHUCK: And why not a muskrat? Why should man imagine himself superior to a muskrat? Life beats in all the small creatures of field and wood. Life singing of eternal sorrow. An old sorrow. The Song of Songs. We don't understand — but who cares about understanding? Only public accountants and chiropodists. Also mailmen. We only love. The Sweet Mystery of Love. That's all there is to it. Give me love and shove all your philosophers up your stovepipe. When Mary took the homeless muskrat, her heart broke open and life and love rushed in. Muskrats make good imitation mink coats, but that's not the point. Life is the point.

"Jake: (rushing in) Say, folks, who's got a stamp with a picture of George Washington on it?

"Curtain."

Ike slammed his manuscript shut and took a long swig of air. His voice was hoarse after two hours of reading aloud and he had read the climax of his play on a single long breath. He looked at his audience, his mouth smiling in self-mockery, his eyebrows raised insolently, but his eyes pleading.

Ellsworth Toohey, sitting on the floor, scratched his spine against a chair leg and yawned. Gus Webb, stretched out on his stomach in the middle of the room, rolled over on his back. Lancelot Clokey, the foreign correspondent, reached for his highball glass and finished it off. Jules Fougler, the new drama critic of the Banner, sat without moving; he had not moved for two hours. Lois Cook, hostess, raised her arms, twisting them, stretching, and said:

"Jesus, Ike, it's awful."

Lancelot Clokey drawled, "Lois, my girl, where do you keep your gin? Don't be such a damn miser. You're the worst hostess I know."

Gus Webb said, "I don't understand literature. It's nonproductive and a waste of time. Authors will be liquidated."

Ike laughed shrilly. "A stinker, huh?" He waved his script. "A real super-stinker. What do you think I wrote it for? Just show me anyone who can write a bigger flop. Worst play you'll ever hear in your life."

It was not a formal meeting of the Council of American Writers, but an unofficial gathering. Ike had asked a few of his friends to listen to his latest work. At twenty-six he had written eleven plays, but had never had one produced.

"You'd better give up the theater, Ike," said Lancelot Clokey. "Writing is a serious business and not for any stray bastard that wants to try it." Lancelot Clokey's first book — an account of his personal adventures in foreign countries — was in its tenth week on the best-seller list.

"Why isn't it, Lance?" Toohey drawled sweetly.

"All right," snapped Clokey, "all right. Give me a drink."

"It's awful," said Lois Cook, her head lolling wearily from side to side. "It's perfectly awful. It's so awful it's wonderful."

"Balls," said Gus Webb. "Why do I ever come here?"

Ike flung his script at the fireplace. It struck against the wire screen and landed, face down, open, the thin pages crushed.

"If Ibsen can write plays, why can't I?" he asked. "He's good and I'm lousy, but that's not a sufficient reason."

"Not in the cosmic sense," said Lancelot Clokey. "Still, you're lousy."

"You don't have to say it. I said so first."

"This is a great play," said a voice.

The voice was slow, nasal and bored. It had spoken for the first time that evening, and they all turned to Jules Fougler. A cartoonist had once drawn a famous picture of him; it consisted of two sagging circles, a large one and a small one: the large one was his stomach, the small one — his lower lip. He wore a suit, beautifully tailored, of a color to which he referred as "merde d'oie." He kept his gloves on at all times and he carried a cane. He was an eminent drama critic.

Jules Fougler stretched out his cane, caught the playscript with the hook of the handle and dragged it across the floor to his feet. He did not pick it up, but he repeated, looking down at it:

"This is a great play."

"Why?" asked Lancelot Clokey.

"Because I say so," said Jules Fougler.

"Is that a gag, Jules?" asked Lois Cook.

"I never gag," said Jules Fougler. "It is vulgar."

"Send me a coupla seats to the opening," sneered Lancelot Clokey.

"Eight-eighty for two seats to the opening," said Jules Fougler. "It will be the biggest hit of the season."

Jules Fougler turned and saw Toohey looking at him. Toohey smiled but the smile was not light or careless; it was an approving commentary upon something he considered as very serious indeed. Fougler's glance was contemptuous when turned to the others, but it relaxed for a moment of understanding when it rested on Toohey.

"Why don't you join the Council of American Writers, Jules?" asked Toohey.

"I am an individualist," said Fougler. "I don't believe in organizations. Besides, is it necessary?"

"No, not necessary at all," said Toohey cheerfully. "Not for you, Jules. There's nothing I can teach you."

"What I like about you, Ellsworth, is that it's never necessary to explain myself to you."

"Hell, why explain anything here? We're six of a kind."

"Five," said Fougler. "I don't like Gus Webb."

"Why don't you?" asked Gus. He was not offended.

"Because he doesn't wash his ears," answered Fougler, as if the question had been asked by a third party.

"Oh, that," said Gus.

Ike had risen and stood staring at Fougler, not quite certain whether he should breathe.

"You like my play, Mr. Fougler?" he asked at last, his voice small.

"I haven't said I liked it," Fougler answered coldly. "I think it smells. That is why it's great."

"Oh," said Ike. He laughed. He seemed relieved. His glance went around the faces in the room, a glance of sly triumph.

"Yes," said Fougler, "my approach to its criticism is the same as your approach to its writing. Our motives are identical."

"You're a grand guy, Jules."

"Mr. Fougler, please."

"You're a grand guy and the swellest bastard on earth, Mr. Fougler."

Fougler turned the pages of the script at his feet with the tip of his cane.

"Your typing is atrocious, Ike," he said.

"Hell, I'm not a stenographer. I'm a creative artist."

"You will be able to afford a secretary after this show opens. I shall be obliged to praise it — if for no other reason than to prevent any further abuse of a typewriter, such as this. The typewriter is a splendid instrument, not to be outraged."

"All right, Jules," said Lancelot Clokey, "it's all very witty and smart and you're sophisticated and brilliant as all get-out — but what do you actually want to praise that crap for?"

"Because it is — as you put it — crap."

"You're not logical, Lance," said Ike. "Not in the cosmic sense, you aren't. To write a good play and to have it praised is nothing. Anybody can do that. Anybody with talent — and talent is only a glandular accident. But to write a piece of crap and have it praised — well, you match that."

"He has," said Toohey.

"That's a matter of opinion," said Lancelot Clokey. He upturned his empty glass over his mouth and sucked at a last piece of ice.

"Ike understands things much better than you do, Lance," said Jules Fougler. "He has just proved himself to be a real thinker — in that little speech of his. Which, incidentally, was better than his whole play."

"I'll write my next play about that," said Ike.

"Ike has stated his reasons," Fougler continued. "And mine. And also yours, Lance. Examine my case, if you wish. What achievement is there for a critic in praising a good play? None whatever. The critic is then nothing but a kind of glorified messenger boy between author and public. What's there in that for me? I'm sick of it. I have a right to wish to impress my own personality upon people. Otherwise, I shall become frustrated — and I do not believe in frustration. But if a critic is able to put over a perfectly worthless play — ah, you do perceive the difference! Therefore, I shall make a hit out of — what's the name of your play, Ike?"

"No skin off your ass," said Ike.

"I beg your pardon?"

"That's the title."

"Oh, I see. Therefore, I shall make a hit out of No Skin Off Your Ass."

Lois Cook laughed loudly.

"You all make too damn much fuss about everything," said Gus Webb, lying flat, his hands entwined under his head.

"Now if you wish to consider your own case, Lance," Fougler went on. "What satisfaction is there for a correspondent in reporting on world events? The public reads about all sorts of international crises and you're lucky if they ever notice your by-line. But you're every bit as good as any general, admiral or ambassador. You have a right to make people conscious of yourself. So you've done the wise thing. You've written a remarkable collection of bilge — yes, bilge — but morally justified. A clever book. World catastrophes used as a backdrop for your own nasty little personality. How Lancelot Clokey got drunk at an international conference. What beauties slept with Lancelot Clokey during an invasion. How Lancelot Clokey got dysentery in a land of famine. Well, why not, Lance? It went over, didn't it? Ellsworth put it over, didn't he?"

"The public appreciates good human-interest stuff," said Lancelot Clokey, looking angrily into his glass.

"Oh, can the crap, Lance!" cried Lois Cook. "Who're you acting for here? You know damn well it wasn't any kind of a human interest, but plain Ellsworth Toohey."

"I don't forget what I owe Ellsworth," said Clokey sullenly. "Ellsworth's my best friend. Still, he couldn't have done it if he didn't have a good book to do it with."

Eight months ago Lancelot Clokey had stood with a manuscript in his hand before Ellsworth Toohey, as Ike stood before Fougler now, not believing it when Toohey told him that his book would top the bestseller list. But two hundred thousand copies sold had made it impossible for Clokey ever to recognize any truth again in any form.

"Well, he did it with The Gallant Gallstone," said Lois Cook placidly, "and a worse piece of trash never was put down on paper. I ought to know. But he did it."

"And almost lost my job doing it," said Toohey indifferently.

"What do you do with your liquor, Lois?" snapped Clokey. "Save it to take a bath in?"

"All right, blotter," said Lois Cook, rising lazily.

She shuffled across the room, picked somebody's unfinished drink off the floor, drank the remnant, walked out and came back with an assortment of expensive bottles. Clokey and Ike hurried to help themselves.

"I think you're unfair to Lance, Lois," said Toohey. "Why shouldn't he write an autobiography?"

"Because his life wasn't worth living, let alone recording."

"Ah, but that is precisely why I made it a bestseller."

"You're telling me?"

"I like to tell someone."

There were many comfortable chairs around him, but Toohey preferred to remain on the floor. He rolled over to his stomach, propping his torso upright on his elbows, and he lolled, pleasurably, switching his weight from elbow to elbow, his legs spread out in a wide fork on the carpet. He seemed to enjoy unrestraint.

"I like to tell someone. Next month I'm pushing the autobiography of a small-town dentist who's really a remarkable person — because there's not a single remarkable day in his life nor sentence in his book. You'll like it, Lois. Can you imagine a solid bromide undressing his soul as if it were a revelation?"

"The little people," said Ike tenderly. "I love the little people. We must love the little people of this earth."

"Save that for your next play," said Toohey.

"I can't," said Ike. "It's in this one."

"What's the big idea, Ellsworth?" snapped Clokey.

"Why, it's simple, Lance. When the fact that one is a total nonentity who's done nothing more outstanding than eating, sleeping and chatting with neighbors becomes a fact worthy of pride, of announcement to the world and of diligent study by millions of readers — the fact that one has built a cathedral becomes unrecordable and unannounceable. A matter of perspectives and relativity. The distance permissible between the extremes of any particular capacity is limited. The sound perception of an ant does not include thunder."

"You talk like a decadent bourgeois, Ellsworth," said Gus Webb.

"Pipe down, Sweetie-pie," said Toohey without resentment.

"It's all very wonderful," said Lois Cook, "except that you're doing too well, Ellsworth. You'll run me out of business. Pretty soon if I still want to be noticed, I'll have to write something that's actually good."

"Not in this century, Lois," said Toohey. "And perhaps not in the next. It's later than you think."

"But you haven't said ... !" Ike cried suddenly, worried.

"What haven't I said?"

"You haven't said who's going to produce my play!"

"Leave that to me," said Jules Fougler.

"I forgot to thank you, Ellsworth," said Ike solemnly. "So now I thank you. There are lots of bum plays, but you picked mine. You and Mr. Fougler."

"Your bumness is serviceable, Ike."

"Well, that's something."

"It's a great deal."

"How — for instance?"

"Don't talk too much, Ellsworth," said Gus Webb. "You've got a talking jag."

"Shut your face, Kewpie-doll. I like to talk. For instance, Ike? Well, for instance, suppose I didn't like Ibsen — "

"Ibsen is good," said Ike.

"Sure he's good, but suppose I didn't like him. Suppose I wanted to stop people from seeing his plays. It would do me no good whatever to tell them so. But if I sold them the idea that you're just as great as Ibsen — pretty soon they wouldn't be able to tell the difference."

"Jesus, can you?"

"It's only an example, Ike."

"But it would be wonderful!"

"Yes. It would be wonderful. And then it wouldn't matter what they went to see at all. Then nothing would matter — neither the writers nor those for whom they wrote."

"How's that Ellsworth?"

"Look, Ike, there's no room in the theater for both Ibsen and you. You do understand that, don't you?"

"In a manner of speaking — yes."

"Well, you do want me to make room for you, don't you?"

"All of this useless discussion has been covered before and much better," said Gus Webb. "Shorter. I believe in functional economy."

"Where's it covered, Gus?" asked Lois Cook.

"'Who had been nothing shall be all,' sister."

"Gus is crude, but deep," said Ike. "I like him."

"Go to hell," said Gus.

Lois Cook's butler entered the room. He was a stately, elderly man and he wore full-dress evening clothes. He announced Peter Keating.

"Pete?" said Lois Cook gaily. "Why, sure, shove him in, shove him right in."

Keating entered and stopped, startled, when he saw the gathering.

"Oh ... hello, everybody," he said bleakly. "I didn't know you had company, Lois."

"That's not company. Come in, Pete, sit down, grab yourself a drink, you know everybody."

"Hello, Ellsworth," said Keating, his eyes resting on Toohey for support.

Toohey waved his hand, scrambled to his feet and settled down in an armchair, crossing his legs gracefully. Everybody in the room adjusted himself automatically to a sudden control: to sit straighter, to bring knees together, to pull in a relaxed mouth. Only Gus Webb remained stretched as before.

Keating looked cool and handsome, bringing into the unventilated room the freshness of a walk through cold streets. But he was pale, and his movements were slow, tired.

"Sorry if I intrude, Lois," he said. "Had nothing to do and felt so damn lonely, thought I'd drop in." He slurred over the word "lonely," throwing it away with a self-deprecatory smile. "Damn tired of Neil Dumont and the bunch. Wanted more uplifting company — sort of spiritual food, huh?"

"I'm a genius," said Ike. "I'll have a play on Broadway. Me and Ibsen. Ellsworth said so."

"Ike has just read his new play to us," said Toohey. "A magnificent piece of work."

"You'll love it, Peter," said Lancelot Clokey. "It's really great."

"It is a masterpiece," said Jules Fougler. "I hope you will prove yourself worthy of it, Peter. It is the kind of play that depends upon what the members of the audience are capable of bringing with them into the theater. If you are one of those literal-minded people, with a dry soul and a limited imagination, it is not for you. But if you are a real human being with a big, big heart full of laughter, who has preserved the uncorrupted capacity of his childhood for pure emotion — you will find it an unforgettable experience."

"Except as ye become as little children ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven," said Ellsworth Toohey.

"Thanks, Ellsworth," said Jules Fougler. "That will be the lead of my review."

Keating looked at Ike, at the others, his eyes eager. They all seemed remote and pure, far above him in the safety of their knowledge, but their faces had hints of smiling warmth, a benevolent invitation extended downward.

Keating drank the sense of their greatness, that spiritual food he sought in common here, and felt himself rising through them. They saw their greatness made real by him. A circuit was established in the room and the circle closed. Everybody was conscious of that, except Peter Keating.

Ellsworth Toohey came out in support of the cause of modern architecture.

In the past ten years, while most of the new residences continued to be built as faithful historical copies, the principles of Henry Cameron had won the field of commercial structures: the factories, the office buildings, the skyscrapers. It was a pale, distorted victory; a reluctant compromise that consisted of omitting columns and pediments, allowing a few stretches of wall to remain naked, apologizing for a shape — good through accident — by finishing it off with an edge of simplified Grecian volutes. Many stole Cameron's forms; few understood his thinking. The sole part of his argument irresistible to the owners of new structures was financial economy; he won to that extent.

In the countries of Europe, most prominently in Germany, a new school of building had been growing for a long time: it consisted of putting up four walls and a flat top over them, with a few openings. This was called new architecture. The freedom from arbitrary rules, for which Cameron had fought, the freedom that imposed a great new responsibility on the creative builder, became mere elimination of all effort, even the effort of mastering historical styles. It became a rigid set of new rules — the discipline of conscious incompetence, creative poverty made into a system, mediocrity boastfully confessed.

"A building creates its own beauty, and its ornament is derived from the rules of its theme and its structure," Cameron had said. "A building needs no beauty, no ornament and no theme," said the new architects. It was safe to say it. Cameron and a few men had broken the path and paved it with their lives. Other men, of whom there were greater numbers, the men who had been safe in copying the Parthenon, saw the danger and found a way to security: to walk Cameron's path and make it lead them to a new Parthenon, an easier Parthenon in the shape of a packing crate of glass and concrete. The palm tree had broken through; the fungus came to feed on it, to deform it, to hide it, to pull it back into the common jungle.

The jungle found its words.

In "One Small Voice," subtitled "I Swim with the Current," Ellsworth Toohey wrote:

"We have hesitated for a long time to acknowledge the powerful phenomenon known as Modern Architecture. Such caution is requisite in anyone who stands in the position of mentor to the public taste. Too often, isolated manifestations of anomaly can be mistaken for a broad popular movement, and one should be careful not to ascribe to them a significance they do not deserve. But Modern Architecture has stood the test of time, has answered a demand of the masses, and we are glad to salute it.

"It is not amiss to offer a measure of recognition to the pioneers of this movement, such as the late Henry Cameron. Premonitory echoes of the new grandeur can be found in some of his work. But like all pioneers he was still bound by the inherited prejudices of the past, by the sentimentality of the middle class from which he came. He succumbed to the superstition of beauty and ornament, even though the ornament was of his own devising, and, consequently, inferior to that of established historical forms.

"It remained for the power of a broad, collective movement to bring Modern Architecture to its full and true expression. Now it can be seen — growing throughout the world — not as a chaos of individual fancies, but as a cohesive, organized discipline which makes severe demands upon the artist, among them the demand to subordinate himself to the collective nature of his craft.

"The rules of this new architecture have been formulated by the vast process of popular creation. They are as strict as the rules of Classicism. They demand unadorned simplicity — like the honesty of the unspoiled common man. Just as in the passing age of international bankers every building had to have an ostentatious cornice, so now the coming age ordains that every building have a flat roof. Just as the imperialist era of humanity required that every house have corner windows — symbol of the sunshine distributed equally to all.

"The discriminating will see the social significance eloquent in the forms of this new architecture. Under the old system of exploitation, the most useful social elements — the workers — were never permitted to realize their importance; their practical functions were kept hidden and disguised; thus a master had his servants dressed up in fancy gold-braided livery. This was reflected in the architecture of the period: the functional elements of a building — its doors, windows, stairways — were hidden under the scrolls of pointless ornamentation. But in a modern building, it is precisely these useful elements — symbols of toil — that come starkly in the open. Do we not hear in this the voice of a new world where the worker shall come into his own?

"As the best example of Modern Architecture in America, we call to your attention the new plant of the Bassett Brush Company, soon to be completed. It is a small building, but in its modest proportions it embodies all the grim simplicity of the new discipline and presents an invigorating example of the Grandeur of the Little. It was designed by Augustus Webb, a young architect of great promise."

Meeting Toohey a few days later, Peter Keating asked, disturbed:

"Say, Ellsworth, did you mean it?"

"What?"

"About modern architecture."

"Of course I meant it. How did you like my little piece?"

"Oh, I thought it was very beautiful. Very convincing. But say, Ellsworth, why ... why did you pick Gus Webb? After all, I've done some modernistic things in the last few years. The Palmer Building was quite bare, and the Mowry Building was nothing but roof and windows, and the Sheldon Warehouse was ... "

"Now, Peter, don't be a hog. I've done pretty well by you, haven't I? Let me give somebody else a boost once in a while."

At a luncheon where he had to speak on architecture, Peter Keating stated:

"In reviewing my career to date, I came to the conclusion that I have worked on a true principle: the principle that constant change is a necessity of life. Since buildings are an indispensable part of life, it follows that architecture must change constantly. I have never developed any architectural prejudices for myself, but insisted on keeping my mind open to all the voices of the times. The fanatics who went around preaching that all structures must be modern were just as narrow-minded as the hidebound conservatives who demanded that we employ nothing but historical styles. I do not apologize for those of my buildings which were designed in the Classical tradition. They were an answer to the need of their era. Neither do I apologize for the buildings which I designed in the modern style. They represent the coming better world. It is my opinion that in the humble realization of this principle lies the reward and the joy of being an architect."

There was gratifying publicity, and many flattering comments of envy in professional circles, when the news of Peter Keating's selection to build Stoneridge was made public. He tried to recapture his old pleasure in such manifestations. He failed. He still felt something that resembled gladness, but it was faded and thin.

The effort of designing Stoneridge seemed a load too vast to lift. He did not mind the circumstances through which he had obtained it; that, too, had become pale and weightless in his mind, accepted and almost forgotten. He simply could not face the task of designing the great number of houses that Stoneridge required. He felt very tired. He felt tired when he awakened in the morning, and he found himself waiting all day for the time when he would be able to go back to bed.

He turned Stoneridge over to Neil Dumont and Bennett. "Go ahead," he said wearily, "do what you want."

"What style, Pete?" Dumont asked. "Oh, make it some sort of period — the small home owners won't go for it otherwise. But trim it down a little — for the press comments. Give it historical touches and a modern feeling. Any way you wish. I don't care."

Dumont and Bennett went ahead. Keating changed a few roof lines on their sketches, a few windows. The preliminary drawings were approved by Wynand's office. Keating did not know whether Wynand had approved in person. He did not see Wynand again.

Dominique had been away a month, when Guy Francon announced his retirement. Keating had told him about the divorce, offering no explanation. Francon had taken the news calmly. He had said: "I expected it. It's all right, Peter. It's probably not your fault nor hers." He had not mentioned it since. Now he gave no explanation of his retirement, only: "I told you it was coming, long ago. I'm tired. Good luck, Peter."

The responsibility of the firm on his lonely shoulders and the prospect of his solitary name on the office door left Keating uneasy. He needed a partner. He chose Neil Dumont. Neil had grace and distinction. He was another Lucius Heyer. The firm became Peter Keating & Cornelius Dumont. Some sort of drunken celebration of the event was held by a few friends, but Keating did not attend it. He had promised to attend, but he forgot about it, went for a solitary weekend in the snowbound country, and did not remember the celebration until the morning after it was held, when he was walking alone down a frozen country road.

Stoneridge was the last contract signed by the firm of Francon & Keating.

7.

WHEN Dominique stepped off the train in New York, Wynand was there to meet her. She had not written to him nor heard from him during the weeks of her residence in Reno; she had notified no one of her return. But his figure standing on the platform, standing calmly, with an air of finality, told her that he had kept in touch with her lawyers, had followed every step of the divorce proceedings, had known the date when the decree was granted, the hour when she took the train and the number of her compartment.

He did not move forward when he saw her. It was she who walked to him, because she knew that he wanted to see her walking, if only the short space between them. She did not smile, but her face had the lovely serenity that can become a smile without transition.

"Hello, Gail."

"Hello, Dominique."

She had not thought of him in his absence, not sharply, not with a personal feeling of his reality, but now she felt an immediate recognition, a sense of reunion with someone known and needed.

He said: "Give me your baggage checks, I'll have it attended to later; my car is outside."

She handed him the checks and he slipped them into his pocket. They knew they must turn and walk up the platform to the exit, but the decisions both had made in advance broke down in the same instant, because they did not turn, but remained standing, looking at each other.

He made the first effort to correct the breach. He smiled lightly.

"If I had the right to say it, I'd say that I couldn't have endured the waiting had I known that you'd look as you do. But since I have no such right, I'm not going to say it."

She laughed. "All right, Gail. That was a form of pretense, too — our being too casual. It makes things more important, not less, doesn't it? Let's say whatever we wish."

"I love you," he said, his voice expressionless, as if the words were a statement of pain and not addressed to her.

"I'm glad to be back with you, Gail. I didn't know I would be, but I'm glad."

"In what way, Dominique?"

"I don't know. In a way of contagion from you, I think. In a way of finality and peace."

Then they noticed that this was said in the middle of a crowded platform, with people and baggage racks hurrying past.

They walked out to the street, to his car. She did not ask where they were going; and did not care. She sat silently beside him. She felt divided, most of her swept by a wish not to resist, and a small part of her left to wonder about it. She felt a desire to let him carry her — a feeling of confidence without appraisal, not a happy confidence, but confidence. After a while, she noticed that her hand lay in his, the length of her gloved fingers held to the length of his, only the spot of her bare wrist pressed to his skin. She had not noticed him take her hand; it seemed so natural and what she had wanted from the moment of seeing him. But she could not allow herself to want it.

"Where are we going, Gail?" she asked.

"To get the license. Then to the judge's office. To be married."

She sat up slowly, turning to face him. She did not withdraw her hand, but her fingers became rigid, conscious, taken away from him.

"No," she said.

She smiled and held the smile too long, in deliberate, fixed precision. He looked at her calmly.

"I want a real wedding, Gail. I want it at the most ostentatious hotel in town. I want engraved invitations, guests, mobs of guests, celebrities, flowers, flash bulbs and newsreel cameras. I want the kind of wedding the public expects of Gail Wynand."

He released her fingers, simply, without resentment. He looked abstracted for a moment, as if he were calculating a problem in arithmetic, not too difficult. Then he said:

"All right. That will take a week to arrange. I could have it done tonight, but if it's engraved invitations, we must give the guests a week's notice at the least. Otherwise it would look abnormal and you want a normal Gail Wynand wedding. I'll have to take you to a hotel now, where you can live for a week. I had not planned for this, so I've made no reservations. Where would you like to stay?"

"At your penthouse."

"No."

"The Nordland, then."

He leaned forward and said to the chauffeur:

"The Nordland, John."

In the lobby of the hotel, he said to her:

"I will see you a week from today, Tuesday, at the Noyes-Belmont, at four o'clock in the afternoon. The invitations will have to be in the name of your father. Let him know that I'll get in touch with him. I'll attend to the rest."

He bowed, his manner unchanged, his calm still holding the same peculiar quality made of two things: the mature control of a man so certain of his capacity for control that it could seem casual, and a childlike simplicity of accepting events as if they were subject to no possible change.

She did not see him during that week. She found herself waiting impatiently.

She saw him again when she stood beside him, facing a judge who pronounced the words of the marriage ceremony over the silence of six hundred people in the floodlighted ballroom of the Noyes-Belmont Hotel.

The background she had wished was set so perfectly that it became its own caricature, not a specific society wedding, but an impersonal prototype of lavish, exquisite vulgarity. He had understood her wish and obeyed scrupulously; he had refused himself the relief of exaggeration, he had not staged the event crudely, but made it beautiful in the exact manner Gail Wynand, the publisher, would have chosen had he wished to be married in public. But Gail Wynand did not wish to be married in public.

He made himself fit the setting, as if he were part of the bargain, subject to the same style. When he entered, she saw him looking at the mob of guests as if he did not realize that such a mob was appropriate to a Grand Opera premiere or a royal rummage sale, not to the solemn climax of his life. He looked correct, incomparably distinguished.

Then she stood with him, the mob becoming a heavy silence and a gluttonous stare behind him, and they faced the judge together. She wore a long, black dress with a bouquet of fresh jasmine, his present, attached by a black band to her wrist. Her face in the halo of a black lace hat was raised to the judge who spoke slowly, letting his words hang one by one in the air.

She glanced at Wynand. He was not looking at her nor at the judge. Then she saw that he was alone in that room. He held this moment and he made of it, of the glare, of the vulgarity, a silent height of his own. He had not wished a religious ceremony, which he did not respect, and he could have less respect for the state's functionary reciting a formula before him — but he made the rite an act of pure religion. She thought, if she were being married to Roark in such a setting, Roark would stand like this.

Afterward, the mockery of the monster reception that followed left him immune. He posed with her for the battery of press cameras and he complied gracefully with all the demands of the reporters, a special, noisier mob within the mob. He stood with her in the receiving line, shaking an assembly belt of hands that unrolled past them for hours. He looked untouched by the lights, the haystacks of Easter lilies, the sounds of a string orchestra, the river of people flowing on and breaking into a delta when it reached the champagne; untouched by these guests who had come here driven by boredom, by an envious hatred, a reluctant submission to an invitation bearing his dangerous name, a scandal-hungry curiosity. He looked as if he did not know that they took his public immolation as their rightful due, that they considered their presence as the indispensable seal of sacrament upon the occasion, that of all the hundreds he and his bride were the only ones to whom the performance was hideous.

She watched him intently. She wanted to see him take pleasure in all this, if only for a moment. Let him accept and join, just once, she thought, let him show the soul of the New York Banner in its proper element. She saw no acceptance. She saw a hint of pain, at times; but even the pain did not reach him completely. And she thought of the only other man she knew who had spoken about suffering that went down only to a certain point.

When the last congratulations had drifted past them, they were free to leave by the rules of the occasion. But he made no move to leave. She knew he was waiting for her decision. She walked away from him into the currents of guests; she smiled, bowed and listened to offensive nonsense, a glass of champagne in her hand.

She saw her father in the throng. He looked proud and wistful; he seemed bewildered. He had taken the announcement of her marriage quietly; he had said: "I want you to be happy, Dominique. I want it very much. I hope he's the right man." His tone had said that he was not certain.

She saw Ellsworth Toohey in the crowd. He noticed her looking at him and turned away quickly. She wanted to laugh aloud; but the matter of Ellsworth Toohey caught off guard did not seem important enough to laugh about now.

Alvah Scarret pushed his way toward her. He was making a poor effort at a suitable expression, but his face looked hurt and sullen. He muttered something rapid about his wishes for her happiness, but then he said distinctly and with a lively anger:

"But why, Dominique? Why?"

She could not quite believe that Alvah Scarret would permit himself the crudeness of what the question seemed to mean. She asked coldly:

"What are you talking about, Alvah?"

"The veto, of course."

"What veto?"

"You know very well what veto. Now I ask you, with every sheet in the city here, every damn one of them, the lousiest tabloid included, and the wire services too — everything but the Banner! Everything but the Wynand papers! What am I to tell people? How am I to explain? Is that a thing for you to do to a former comrade of the trade?"

"You'd better repeat that, Alvah."

"You mean you didn't know that Gail wouldn't allow a single one of our guys here? That we won't have any stories tomorrow, not a spread, not a picture, nothing but two lines on page eighteen?"

"No," she said, "I didn't know it."

He wondered at the sudden jerk of her movement as she turned away from him. She handed the champagne glass to the first stranger in sight, whom she mistook for a waiter. She made her way through the crowd to Wynand.

"Let's go, Gail."

"Yes, my dear."

She stood, incredulously, in the middle of the drawing room of his penthouse, thinking that this place was now her home and how right it looked to be her home.

He watched her. He showed no desire to speak or touch her, only to observe her here, in his house, brought here, lifted high over the city; as if the significance of the moment were not to be shared, not even with her.

She moved slowly across the room, took off her hat, leaned against the edge of a table. She wondered why her normal desire to say little, to hold things closed, broke down before him, why she felt compelled to simple frankness, such as she could offer no one else.

"You've had your way after all, Gail. You were married as you wanted to be married."

"Yes, I think so."

"It was useless to try to torture you."

"Actually, yes. But I didn't mind it too much."

"You didn't?"

"No. If that's what you wanted it was only a matter of keeping my promise."

"But you hated it, Gail."

"Utterly. What of it? Only the first moment was hard — when you said it in the car. Afterward, I was rather glad of it." He spoke quietly, matching her frankness; she knew he would leave her the choice — he would follow her manner — he would keep silent or admit anything she wished to be admitted.

"Why?"

"Didn't you notice your own mistake — if it was a mistake? You wouldn't have wanted to make me suffer if you were completely indifferent to me."

"No. It was not a mistake."

"You're a good loser, Dominique."

"I think that's also contagion from you, Gail. And there's something I want to thank you for."

"What?"

"That you barred our wedding from the Wynand papers." He looked at her, his eyes alert in a special way for a moment, then he smiled.

"It's out of character — your thanking me for that."

"It was out of character for you to do it."

"I had to. But I thought you'd be angry."

"I should have been. But I wasn't. I'm not. I thank you."

"Can one feel gratitude for gratitude? It's a little hard to express, but that's what I feel, Dominique."

She looked at the soft light on the walls around her. That lighting was part of the room, giving the walls a special texture of more than material or color. She thought that there were other rooms beyond these walls, rooms she had never seen which were hers now. And she found that she wanted them to be hers.

"Gail, I haven't asked you what we are to do now. Are we going away? Are we having a honeymoon? Funny, I haven't even wondered about it. I thought of the wedding and nothing beyond. As if it stopped there and you took over from then on. Also out of character, Gail."

"But not in my favor, this time. Passivity is not a good sign. Not for you."

"It might be — if I'm glad of it."

"Might. Though it won't last. No, we're not going anywhere. Unless you wish to go."

"No."

"Then we stay here. Another peculiar manner of making an exception. The proper manner for you and me. Going away has always been running — for both of us. This time, we don't run."

"Yes, Gail."

When he held her and kissed her, her arm lay bent, pressed between her body and his, her hand at her shoulder — and she felt her cheek touching the faded jasmine bouquet on her wrist, its perfume still intact, still a delicate suggestion of spring.

When she entered his bedroom, she found that it was not the place she had seen photographed in countless magazines. The glass cage had been demolished. The room built in its place was a solid vault without a single window. It was lighted and air-conditioned, but neither light nor air came from the outside.

She lay in his bed and she pressed her palms to the cold, smooth sheet at her sides, not to let her arms move and touch him. But her rigid indifference did not drive him to helpless anger. He understood. He laughed. She heard him say — his voice rough, without consideration, amused — "It won't do, Dominique." And she knew that this barrier would not be held between them, that she had no power to hold it. She felt the answer in her body, an answer of hunger, of acceptance, of pleasure. She thought that it was not a matter of desire, not even a matter of the sexual act, but only that man was the life force and woman could respond to nothing else; that this man had the will of life, the prime power, and this act was only its simplest statement, and she was responding not to the act nor to the man, but to that force within him.

"Well?" asked Ellsworth Toohey. "Now do you get the point?"

He stood leaning informally against the back of Scarret's chair, and Scarret sat staring down at a hamper full of mail by the side of his desk.

"Thousands," sighed Scarret, "thousands, Ellsworth. You ought to see what they call him. Why didn't he print the story of his wedding? What's he ashamed of? What's he got to hide? Why didn't he get married in church, like any decent man? How could he marry a divorcee? That's what they're all asking. Thousands. And he won't even look at the letters. Gail Wynand, the man they called the seismograph of public opinion."

"That's right," said Toohey. "That kind of a man."

"Here's a sample," Scarret picked up a letter from his desk and read aloud: "'I'm a respectable woman and mother of five children and I certainly don't think I want to bring up my children with your newspaper. Have taken same for fourteen years, but now that you show that you're the kind of man that has no decency and making a mockery of the holy institution of marriage which is to commit adultery with a fallen woman also another man's wife who gets married in a black dress as she jolly well ought to, I won't read your newspaper any more as you're not a man fit for children, and I'm certainly disappointed in you. Very truly yours. Mrs. Thomas Parker.' I read it to him. He just laughed."

"Uh-huh," said Toohey.

"What's got into him?"

"It's nothing that got into him, Alvah. It's something that got out at last."

"By the way, did you know that many papers dug up their old pictures of Dominique's nude statue from that goddamn temple and ran it right with the wedding story — to show Mrs. Wynand's interest in art, the bastards! Are they glad to get back at Gail! Are they giving it to him, the lice! Wonder who reminded them of that one."

"I wouldn't know."

"Well, of course, it's just one of those storms in a teacup. They'll forget all about it in a few weeks. I don't think it will do much harm."

"No. Not this incident alone. Not by itself."

"Huh? Are you predicting something?"

"Those letters predict it, Alvah. Not the letters as such. But that he wouldn't read them."

"Oh, it's no use getting too silly either. Gail knows where to stop and when. Don't make a mountain out of a mo — " He glanced up at Toohey and his voice switched to: "Christ, yes, Ellsworth, you're right. What are we going to do?"

"Nothing, my friend, nothing. Not for a long time yet." Toohey sat down on the edge of Scarret's desk and let the tip of his pointed shoe play among the envelopes in the hamper, tossing them up, making them rustle. He had acquired a pleasant habit of dropping in and out of Scarret's office at all hours. Scarret had come to depend on him.

"Say, Ellsworth," Scarret asked suddenly, "are you really loyal to the Banner!"

"Alvah, don't talk in dialect. Nobody's really that stuffy,"

"No, I mean it ... Well, you know what I mean."

"Haven't the faintest idea. Who's ever disloyal to his bread and butter?"

"Yeah, that's so ... Still, you know, Ellsworth, I like you a lot, only I'm never sure when you're just talking my language or when it's really yours."

"Don't go getting yourself into psychological complexities. You'll get all tangled up. What's on your mind?"

"Why do you still write for the New Frontiers!"

"For money."

"Oh, come, that's chicken feed to you."

"Well, it's a prestige magazine. Why shouldn't I write for them? You haven't got an exclusive on me."

"No, and I don't care who you write for on the side. But the New Frontiers has been damn funny lately."

"About what?"

"About Gail Wynand."

"Oh, rubbish, Alvah!"

"No sir, this isn't rubbish. You just haven't noticed, guess you don't read it close enough, but I've got an instinct about things like that and I know. I know when it's just some smart young punk taking potshots or when a magazine means business."

"You're nervous, Alvah, and you're exaggerating. The New Frontiers is a liberal magazine and they've always sniped at Gail Wynand. Everybody has. He's never been any too popular in the trade, you know. Hasn't hurt him, though, has it?"

"This is different. I don't like it when there's a system behind it, a kind of special purpose, like a lot of little trickles dribbling along, all innocently, and pretty soon they make a little stream, and it all fits pat, and pretty soon ... "

"Getting a persecution mania, Alvah?"

"I don't like it. It was all right when people took cracks at his yachts and women and a few municipal election scandals — which were never proved," he added hastily. "But I don't like it when it's that new intelligentsia slang that people seem to be going for nowadays: Gail Wynand, the exploiter, Gail Wynand, the pirate of capitalism, Gail Wynand, the disease of an era. It's still crap, Ellsworth, only there's dynamite in that kind of crap."

"It's just the modern way of saying the same old things, nothing more. Besides, I can't be responsible for the policy of a magazine just because I sell them an article once in a while."

"Yeah, but ... That's not what I hear."

"What do you hear?"

"I hear you're financing the damn thing."

"Who, me? With what?"

"Well, not you yourself exactly. But I hear it was you who got young Ronny Pickering, the booze hound, to give them a shot in the arm to the tune of one hundred thousand smackers, just about when New Frontiers was going the way of all frontiers."

"Hell, that was just to save Ronny from the town's more expensive gutters. The kid was going to the dogs. Gave him a sort of higher purpose in life. And put one hundred thousand smackers to better use than the chorus cuties who'd have got it out of him anyway."

"Yeah, but you could've attached a little string to the gift, slipped word to the editors that they'd better lay off Gail or else."

"The New Frontiers is not the Banner, Alvah. It's a magazine of principles. One doesn't attach strings to its editors and one doesn't tell them 'or else.'"

"In this game, Ellsworth? Whom are you kidding?"

"Well, if it will set your mind at rest, I'll tell you something you haven't heard. It's not supposed to be known — it was done through a lot of proxies. Did you know that I just got Mitchell Layton to buy a nice fat chunk of the Banner?"

"No!"

"Yes."

"Christ, Ellsworth, that's great! Mitchell Layton? We can use a reservoir like that and ... Wait a minute. Mitchell Layton?"

"Yes. What's wrong with Mitchell Layton?"

"Isn't he the little boy who couldn't digest grandpaw's money?"

"Grandpaw left him an awful lot of money."

"Yeah, but he's a crackpot. He's the one who's been a Yogi, then a vegetarian, then a Unitarian, then a nudist — and now he's gone to build a palace of the proletariat in Moscow."

"So what?"

"But Jesus! — a Red among our stockholders?"

"Mitch isn't a Red. How can one be a Red with a quarter of a billion dollars? He's just a pale tea-rose. Mostly yellow. But a nice kid at heart."

"But — on the Banner!"

"Alvah, you're an ass. Don't you see? I've made him put some dough into a good, solid, conservative paper. That'll cure him of his pink notions and set him in the right direction. Besides, what harm can he do? Your dear Gail controls his papers, doesn't he?"

"Does Gail know about this?"

"No. Dear Gail hasn't been as watchful in the last five years as he used to be. And you'd better not tell him. You see the way Gail's going. He'll need a little pressure. And you'll need the dough. Be nice to Mitch Layton. He can come in handy."

"That's so."

"It is. You see? My heart's in the right place. I've helped a puny little liberal mag like the New Frontiers, but I've also brought a much more substantial hunk of cash to a big stronghold of arch-conservatism such as the New York Banner."

"So you have. Damn decent of you, too, considering that you're a kind of radical yourself."

"Now are you going to talk about any disloyalty?"

"Guess not. Guess you'll stand by the old Banner."

"Of course I will. Why, I love the Banner. I'd do anything for it. Why, I'd give my life for the New York Banner."

8.

WALKING the soil of a desert island holds one anchored to the rest of the earth; but in their penthouse, with the telephone disconnected, Wynand and Dominique had no feeling of the fifty-seven floors below them, of steel shafts braced against granite — and it seemed to them that their home was anchored in space, not an island, but a planet. The city became a friendly sight, an abstraction with which no possible communication could be established, like the sky, a spectacle to be admired, but of no direct concern in their lives.

For two weeks after their wedding they never left the penthouse. She could have pressed the button of the elevator and broken these weeks any time she wished; she did not wish it. She had no desire to resist, to wonder, to question. It was enchantment and peace.

He sat talking to her for hours when she wanted. He was content to sit silently, when she preferred, and look at her as he looked at the objects in his art gallery, with the same distant, undisturbing glance. He answered any question she put to him. He never asked questions. He never spoke of what he felt. When she wished to be alone, he did not call for her. One evening she sat reading in her room and saw him standing at the frozen parapet of the dark roof garden outside, not looking back at the house, only standing in the streak of light from her window.

When the two weeks ended, he went back to his work, to the office of the Banner. But the sense of isolation remained, like a theme declared and to be preserved through all their future days. He came home in the evening and the city ceased to exist. He had no desire to go anywhere. He invited no guests.

He never mentioned it, but she knew that he did not want her to step out of the house, neither with him nor alone. It was a quiet obsession which he did not expect to enforce. When he came home, he asked: "Have you been out?" — never: "Where have you been?" It was not jealousy — the "where" did not matter. When she wanted to buy a pair of shoes, he had three stores send a collection of shoes for her choice — it prevented her visit to a store. When she said she wanted to see a certain picture, he had a projection room built on the roof.

She obeyed, for the first few months. When she realized that she loved their isolation, she broke it at once. She made him accept invitations and she invited guests to their house. He complied without protest.

But he maintained a wall she could not break — the wall he had erected between his wife and his newspapers. Her name never appeared in their pages. He stopped every attempt to draw Mrs. Gail Wynand into public life — to head committees, sponsor charity drives, endorse crusades. He did not hesitate to open her mail — if it bore an official letterhead that betrayed its purpose — to destroy it without answer and to tell her that he had destroyed it. She shrugged and said nothing.

Yet he did not seem to share her contempt for his papers. He did not allow her to discuss them. She could not discover what he thought of them, nor what he felt. Once, when she commented on an offensive editorial, he said coldly:

"I've never apologized for the Banner. I never will."

"But this is really awful, Gail."

"I thought you married me as the publisher of the Banner."

"I thought you didn't like to think of that."

"What I like or dislike doesn't concern you. Don't expect me to change the Banner or sacrifice it. I wouldn't do that for anyone on earth."

She laughed. "I wouldn't ask it, Gail."

He did not laugh in answer.

In his office in the Banner Building, he worked with a new energy, a kind of elated, ferocious drive that surprised the men who had known him in his most ambitious years. He stayed in the office all night when necessary, as he had not done for a long time. Nothing changed in his methods and policy. Alvah Scarret watched him with satisfaction. "We were wrong about him, Ellsworth," said Scarret to his constant companion, "it's the same old Gail, God bless him. Better than ever."

"My dear Alvah," said Toohey, "nothing is ever as simple as you think — nor as fast."

"But he's happy. Don't you see that he's happy?"

"To be happy is the most dangerous thing that could have happened to him. And, as a humanitarian for once, I mean this for his own sake."

Sally Brent decided to outwit her boss. Sally Brent was one of the proudest possessions of the Banner, a stout, middle-aged woman who dressed like a model for a style show of the twenty-first century and wrote like a chambermaid. She had a large personal following among the readers of the Banner. Her popularity made her overconfident.

Sally Brent decided to do a story on Mrs. Gail Wynand. It was just her type of story and there it was, simply going to waste. She gained admittance to Wynand's penthouse, using the tactics of gaining admittance to places where one is not wanted which she had been taught as a well-trained Wynand employee. She made her usual dramatic entrance, wearing a black dress with a fresh sunflower on her shoulder — her constant ornament that had become a personal trade-mark — and she said to Dominique breathlessly: "Mrs. Wynand, I've come here to help you deceive your husband!"

Then she winked at her own naughtiness and explained: "Our dear Mr. Wynand has been unfair to you, my dear, depriving you of your rightful fame, for some reason which I just simply can't understand. But we'll fix him, you and I. What can a man do when we girls get together? He simply doesn't know what good copy you are. So just give me your story, and I'll write it, and it will be so good that he just simply won't be able not to run it."

Dominique was alone at home, and she smiled in a manner which Sally Brent had never seen before, so the right adjectives did not occur to Sally's usually observant mind. Dominique gave her the story. She gave the exact kind of story Sally had dreamed about.

"Yes, of course I cook his breakfast," said Dominique. "Ham and eggs is his favorite dish, just plain ham and eggs ... Oh yes, Miss Brent, I'm very happy. I open my eyes in the morning and I say to myself, it can't be true, it's not poor little me who's become the wife of the great Gail Wynand who had all the glamorous beauties of the world to choose from. You see, I've been in love with him for years. He was just a dream to me, a beautiful, impossible dream. And now it's like a dream come true ... Please, Miss Brent, take this message from me to the women of America: Patience is always rewarded and romance is just around the corner. I think it's a beautiful thought and perhaps it will help other girls as it has helped me ... Yes, all I want of life is to make Gail happy, to share his joys and sorrows, to be a good wife and mother."

Alvah Scarret read the story and liked it so much that he lost all caution. "Run it off, Alvah," Sally Brent urged him, "just have a proof run off and leave it on his desk. He'll okay it, see if he won't." That evening Sally Brent was fired. Her costly contract was bought off — it had three more years to run — and she was told never to enter the Banner Building again for any purpose whatsoever.

Scarret protested in panic: "Gail, you can't fire Sally! Not Sally!"

"When I can't fire anyone I wish on my paper, I'll close it and blow up the God-damn building," said Wynand calmly.

"But her public! We'll lose her public!"

"To hell with her public."

That night, at dinner, Wynand took from his pocket a crumpled wad of paper — the proof cut of the story — and threw it, without a word, at Dominique's face across the table. It hit her cheek and fell to the floor. She picked it up, unrolled it, saw what it was and laughed aloud.

Sally Brent wrote an article on Gail Wynand's love life. In a gay, intellectual manner, in the terms of sociological study, the article presented material such as no pulp magazine would have accepted. It was published in the New Frontiers.

Wynand bought Dominique a necklace designed at his special order. It was made of diamonds without visible settings, spaced wide apart in an irregular pattern, like a handful scattered accidentally, held together by platinum chains made under a microscope, barely noticeable. When he clasped it about her neck, it looked like drops of water fallen at random.

She stood before a mirror. She slipped her dressing gown off her shoulders and let the raindrops glitter on her skin. She said:

"That life story of the Bronx housewife who murdered her husband's young mistress is pretty sordid, Gail. But I think there's something dirtier — the curiosity of the people who like to read about it. And then there's something dirtier still — the people who pander to that curiosity. Actually, it was that housewife — she has piano legs and such a baggy neck in her pictures — who made this necklace possible. It's a beautiful necklace. I shall be proud to wear it."

He smiled; the sudden brightness of his eyes had an odd quality of courage.

"That's one way of looking at it," he said. "There's another. I like to think that I took the worst refuse of the human spirit — the mind of that housewife and the minds of the people who like to read about her — and I made of it this necklace on your shoulders. I like to think that I was an alchemist capable of performing so great a purification."

She saw no apology, no regret, no resentment as he looked at her. It was a strange glance; she had noticed it before; a glance of simple worship. And it made her realize that there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence.

She was sitting before her mirror when he entered her dressing room on the following night. He bent down, he pressed his lips to the back of her neck — and he saw a square of paper attached to the corner of her mirror. It was the decoded copy of the cablegram that had ended her career on the Banner. FIRE THE BITCH. G W

He lifted his shoulders, to stand erect behind her. He asked:

"How did you get that?"

"Ellsworth Toohey gave it to me. I thought it was worth preserving. Of course, I didn't know it would ever become so appropriate."

He inclined his head gravely, acknowledging the authorship, and said nothing else.

She expected to find the cablegram gone next morning. But he had not touched it. She would not remove it. It remained on display on the corner of her mirror. When he held her in his arms, she often saw his eyes move to that square of paper. She could not tell what he thought.

In the spring, a publishers' convention took him away from New York for a week. It was their first separation. Dominique surprised him by coming to meet him at the airport when he returned. She was gay and gentle; her manner held a promise he had never expected, could not trust, and found himself trusting completely.

When he entered the drawing room of their penthouse and slumped down, half stretching on a couch, she knew that he wanted to lie still here, to feel the recaptured safety of his own world. She saw his eyes, open, delivered to her, without defense. She stood straight, ready. She said:

"You'd better dress, Gail. We're going to the theater tonight."

He lifted himself to a sitting posture. He smiled, the slanting ridges standing out on his forehead. She had a cold feeling of admiration for him: the control was perfect, all but these ridges. He said:

"Fine. Black tie or white?"

"White. I have tickets for No Skin Off Your Nose. They were very hard to get."

It was too much; it seemed too ludicrous to be part of this moment's contest between them. He broke down by laughing frankly, in helpless disgust.

"Good God, Dominique, not that one!"

"Why, Gail, it's the biggest hit in town. Your own critic, Jules Fougler" — he stopped laughing. He understood — "said it was the great play of our age. Ellsworth Toohey said it was the fresh voice of the coming new world. Alvah Scarret said it was not written in ink, but in the milk of human kindness. Sally Brent — before you fired her — said it made her laugh with a lump in her throat. Why, it's the godchild of the Banner. I thought you would certainly want to see it."

"Yes, of course," he said.

He got up and went to dress.

No Skin Off Your Nose had been running for many months. Ellsworth Toohey had mentioned regretfully in his column that the title of the play had had to be changed slightly — "as a concession to the stuffy prudery of the middle class which still controls our theater. It is a crying example of interference with the freedom of the artist. Now don't let's hear any more of that old twaddle about ours being a free society. Originally, the title of this beautiful play was an authentic line drawn from the language of the people, with the brave, simple eloquence of folk expression."

Wynand and Dominique sat in the center of the fourth row, not looking at each other, listening to the play. The things being done on the stage were merely trite and crass; but the undercurrent made them frightening. There was an air about the ponderous inanities spoken, which the actors had absorbed like an infection; it was in their smirking faces, in the slyness of their voices; in their untidy gestures. It was an air of inanities uttered as revelations and insolently demanding acceptance as such; an air, not of innocent presumption, but of conscious effrontery; as if the author knew the nature of his work and boasted of his power to make it appear sublime in the minds of his audience and thus destroy the capacity for the sublime within them. The work justified the verdict of its sponsors: it brought laughs, it was amusing; it was an indecent joke, acted out not on the stage but in the audience. It was a pedestal from which a god had been torn, and in his place there stood, not Satan with a sword, but a corner lout sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola.

There was silence in the audience, puzzled and humble. When someone laughed, the rest joined in, with relief, glad to learn that they were enjoying themselves. Jules Fougler had not tried to influence anybody; he had merely made clear — well in advance and through many channels — that anyone unable to enjoy this play was, basically, a worthless human being. "It's no use asking for explanations," he had said. "Either you're fine enough to like it or you aren't."

In the intermission Wynand heard a stout woman saying: "It's wonderful. I don't understand it, but I have the feeling that it's something very important." Dominique asked him: "Do you wish to go, Gail?" He said: "No. We'll stay to the end."

He was silent in the car on their way home. When they entered their drawing room, he stood waiting, ready to hear and accept anything. For a moment she felt the desire to spare him. She felt empty and very tired. She did not want to hurt him; she wanted to seek his help.

Then she thought again what she had thought in the theater. She thought that this play was the creation of the Banner, this was what the Banner had forced into life, had fed, upheld, made to triumph. And it was the Banner that had begun and ended the destruction of the Stoddard Temple ... The New York Banner, November 2, 1930 — "One Small Voice" — "Sacrilege" by Ellsworth M. Toohey — "The Churches of our Childhood" by Alvah Scarret — "Are you happy, Mr. Superman?" ... And now that destruction was not an event long since past — this was not a comparison between two mutually unmeasurable entities, a building and a play — it was not an accident, nor a matter of persons, of Ike, Fougler, Toohey, herself ... and Roark. It was a contest without time, a struggle of two abstractions, the thing that had created the building against the things that made the play possible — two forces, suddenly naked to her in their simple statement — two forces that had fought since the world began — and every religion had known of them — and there had always been a God and a Devil — only men had been so mistaken about the shapes of their Devil — he was not single and big, he was many and smutty and small. The Banner had destroyed the Stoddard Temple in order to make room for this play — it could not do otherwise — there was no middle choice, no escape, no neutrality — it was one or the other — it had always been — and the contest had many symbols, but no name and no statement ... Roark, she heard herself screaming inside, Roark ... Roark ... Roark ...

"Dominique ... what's the matter?"

She heard Wynand's voice. It was soft and anxious. He had never allowed himself to betray anxiety. She grasped the sound as a reflection of her own face, of what he had seen in her face.

She stood straight, and sure of herself, and very silent inside.

"I'm thinking of you, Gail," she said.

He waited.

"Well, Gail? The total passion for the total height?" She laughed, letting her arms swing sloppily in the manner of the actors they had seen. "Say, Gail, have you got a two-cent stamp with a picture of George Washington on it? ... How old are you, Gail? How hard have you worked? Your life is more than half over, but you've seen your reward tonight. Your crowning achievement. Of course, no man is ever quite equal to his highest passion. Now if you strive and make a great effort, some day you'll rise to the level of that play!"

He stood quietly, hearing it, accepting.

"I think you should take a manuscript of that play and place it on a stand in the center of your gallery downstairs. I think you should rechristen your yacht and call her No Skin Off Your Nose. I think you should take me — "

"Keep still."

" — and put me in the cast and make me play the role of Mary every evening. Mary who adopts the homeless muskrat and ... "

"Dominique, keep still."

"Then talk. I want to hear you talk."

"I've never justified myself to anyone."

"Well, boast then. That would do just as well."

"If you want to hear it, it made me sick, that play. As you knew it would. That was worse than the Bronx housewife."

"Much worse."

"But I can think of something worse still. Writing a great play and offering it for tonight's audience to laugh at. Letting oneself be martyred by the kind of people we saw frolicking tonight."

He saw that something had reached her; he could not tell whether it was an answer of surprise or of anger. He did not know how well she recognized these words. He went on:

"It did make me sick. But so have a great many things which the Banner has done. It was worse tonight, because there was a quality about it that went beyond the usual. A special kind of malice. But if this is popular with fools, it's the Banner's legitimate province. The Banner was created for the benefit of fools. What else do you want me to admit?"

"What you felt tonight."

"A minor kind of hell. Because you sat there with me. That's what you wanted, wasn't it? To make me feel the contrast. Still, you miscalculated. I looked at the stage and I thought, this is what people are like, such are their spirits, but I — I've found you, I have you — and the contrast was worth the pain. I did suffer tonight, as you wanted, but it was a pain that went only down to a certain point and then ... "

"Shut up!" she screamed. "Shut up, God damn you!"

They stood for a moment, both astonished. He moved first; he knew she needed his help; he grasped her shoulders. She tore herself away. She walked across the room, to the window; she stood looking at the city, at the great buildings spread in black and fire below her.

After a while she said, her voice toneless:

"I'm sorry, Gail."

He did not answer.

"I had no right to say those things to you." She did not turn, her arms raised, holding the frame of the window. "We're even, Gail. I'm paid back, if that will make it better for you. I broke first."

"I don't want you to be paid back." He spoke quietly. "Dominique, what was it?"

"Nothing."

"What did I make you think of? It wasn't what I said. It was something else. What did the words mean to you?"

"Nothing."

"A pain that went only down to a certain point. It was that sentence. Why?" She was looking at the city. In the distance she could see the shaft of the Cord Building. "Dominique, I've seen what you can take. It must be something very terrible if it could do that to you. I must know. There's nothing impossible. I can help you against it, whatever it is." She did not answer. "At the theater, it was not just that fool play. There was something else for you tonight. I saw your face. And then it was the same thing again here. What is it?"

"Gail," she said softly, "will you forgive me?"

He let a moment pass; he had not been prepared for that.

"What have I to forgive you?"

"Everything. And tonight."

"That was your privilege. The condition on which you married me. To make me pay for the Banner."

"I don't want to make you pay for it."

"Why don't you want it any more?"

"It can't be paid for."

In the silence she listened to his steps pacing the room behind her.

"Dominique. What was it?"

"The pain that stops at a certain point? Nothing. Only that you had no right to say it. The men who have, pay for that right, a price you can't afford. But it doesn't matter now. Say it if you wish. I have no right to say it either."

"That wasn't all."

"I think we have a great deal in common, you and I. We've committed the same treason somewhere. No, that's a bad word ... Yes, I think it's the right word. It's the only one that has the feeling of what I mean."

"Dominique, you can't feel that." His voice sounded strange. She turned to him.

"Why?"

"Because that's what I felt tonight. Treason."

"Toward whom?"

"I don't know. If I were religious, I'd say 'God.' But I'm not religious."

"That's what I meant, Gail."

"Why should you feel it? The Banner is not your child."

"There are other forms of the same guilt."

Then he walked to her across the long room, he held her in his arms, he said:

"You don't know the meaning of the kind of words you use. We have a great deal in common, but not that. I'd rather you went on spitting at me than trying to share my offenses."

She let her hand rest against the length of his cheek, her fingertips at his temple.

He asked:

"Will you tell me — now — what it was?"

"Nothing. I undertook more than I could carry. You're tired, Gail. Why don't you go on upstairs? Leave me here for a little while. I just want to look at the city. Then I'll join you and I'll be all right."

9.

DOMINIQUE stood at the rail of the yacht, the deck warm under her flat sandals, the sun on her bare legs, the wind blowing her thin white dress. She looked at Wynand stretched in a deck chair before her.

She thought of the change she noticed in him again aboard ship. She had watched him through the months of their summer cruise. She had seen him once running down a companionway; the picture remained in her mind; a tall white figure thrown forward in a streak of speed and confidence; his hand grasped a railing, risking deliberately the danger of a sudden break, gaining a new propulsion. He was not the corrupt publisher of a popular empire. He was an aristocrat aboard a yacht. He looked, she thought, like what one believes aristocracy to be when one is young: a brilliant kind of gaiety without guilt.

She looked at him in the deck chair. She thought that relaxation was attractive only in those for whom it was an unnatural state; then even limpness acquired purpose. She wondered about him; Gail Wynand, famous for his extraordinary capacity; but this was not merely the force of an ambitious adventurer who had created a chain of newspapers; this — the quality she saw in him here — the thing stretched out under the sun like an answer — this was greater, a first cause, a faculty out of universal dynamics.

"Gail," she said suddenly, involuntarily.

He opened his eyes to look at her.

"I wish I had taken a recording of that," he said lazily. "You'd be startled to hear what it sounded like. Quite wasted here. I'd like to play it back in a bedroom."

"I'll repeat it there, if you wish."

"Thank you, dearest. And I promise not to exaggerate or presume too much. You're not in love with me. You've never loved anyone."

"Why do you think that?"

"If you loved a man, it wouldn't be just a matter of a circus wedding and an atrocious evening in the theater. You'd put him through total hell."

"How do you know that, Gail?"

"Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I'm not the Gail Wynand you'd heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you'd want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that's the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you'd want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn't be easy for you."

"If that's true, then you ... "

"Then I become gentle and humble — to your great astonishment — because I'm the worst scoundrel living."

"I don't believe that, Gail."

"No? I'm not the person before last any more?"

"Not any more."

"Well, dearest, as a matter of fact, I am."

"Why do you want to think that?"

"I don't want to. But I like to be honest. That has been my only private luxury. Don't change your mind about me. Go on seeing me as you saw me before we met."

"Gail, that's not what you want."

"It doesn't matter what I want. I don't want anything — except to own you. Without any answer from you. It has to be without answer. If you begin to look at me too closely, you'll see things you won't like at all."

"What things?"

"You're so beautiful, Dominique. It's such a lovely accident on God's part that there's one person who matches inside and out."

"What things, Gail?"

"Do you know what you're actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art. That's the only field where it can be found — art. But you want it in the flesh. You're in love with it. Well, you see, I've never had any integrity."

"How sure are you of that, Gail?"

"Have you forgotten the Banner?"

"To hell with the Banner."

"All right, to hell with the Banner. It's nice to hear you say that. But the Banner's not the major symptom. That I've never practiced any sort of integrity is not so important. What's important is that I've never felt any need for it. I hate the conception of it. I hate the presumptuousness of the idea."

"Dwight Carson ... " she said. He heard the sound of disgust in her voice.

He laughed. "Yes, Dwight Carson. The man I bought. The individualist who's become a mob-glorifier and, incidentally, a dipsomaniac. I did that. That was worse than the Banner, wasn't it? You don't like to be reminded of that?"

"No."

"But surely you've heard enough screaming about it. All the giants of the spirit whom I've broken. I don't think anybody ever realized how much I enjoyed doing it. It's a kind of lust. I'm perfectly indifferent to slugs like Ellsworth Toohey or my friend Alvah, and quite willing to leave them in peace. But just let me see a man of slightly higher dimension — and I've got to make a sort of Toohey out of him. I've got to. It's like a sex urge."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

"Incidentally, you misunderstand Ellsworth Toohey."

"Possibly. You don't expect me to waste mental effort to untangle that snail's shell?"

"And you contradict yourself."

"Where?"

"Why didn't you set out to destroy me?"

"The exception-making, Dominique. I love you. I had to love you. God help you if you were a man."

"Gail — why?"

"Why have I done all that?"

"Yes."

"Power, Dominique. The only thing I ever wanted. To know that there's not a man living whom I can't force to do — anything. Anything I choose. The man I couldn't break would destroy me. But I've spent years finding out how safe I am. They say I have no sense of honor, I've missed something in life. Well, I haven't missed very much, have I? The thing I've missed — it doesn't exist."

He spoke in a normal tone of voice, but he noticed suddenly that she was listening with the intent concentration needed to hear a whisper of which one can afford to lose no syllable.

"What's the matter, Dominique? What are you thinking about?"

"I'm listening to you, Gail."

She did not say she was listening to his words and to the reason behind them. It was suddenly so clear to her that she heard it as an added clause to each sentence, even though he had no knowledge of what he was confessing.

"The worst thing about dishonest people is what they think of as honesty," he said. "I know a woman who's never held to one conviction for three days running, but when I told her she had no integrity, she got very tight-lipped and said her idea of integrity wasn't mine; it seems she'd never stolen any money. Well, she's one that's in no danger from me whatever. I don't hate her. I hate the impossible conception you love so passionately, Dominique."

"Do you?"

"I've had a lot of fun proving it."

She walked to him and sat down on the deck beside his chair, the planks smooth and hot under her bare legs. He wondered why she looked at him so gently. He frowned. She knew that some reflection of what she had understood remained in her eyes — and she looked away from him.

"Gail, why tell me all that? It's not what you want me to think of you."

"No. It isn't. Why tell you now? Want the truth? Because it has to be told. Because I want to be honest with you. Only with you and with myself. But I wouldn't have the courage to tell you anywhere else. Not at home. Not ashore. Only here — because here it doesn't seem quite real. Does it?"

"No."

"I think I hoped that here you'd accept it — and still think of me as you did when you spoke my name in that way I wanted to record."

She put her head against his chair, her face pressed to his knees, her hand dropped, fingers half-curled, on the glistening planks of the deck. She did not want to show what she had actually heard him saying about himself today.

On a night of late fall they stood together at the roof-garden parapet, looking at the city. The long shafts made of lighted windows were like streams breaking out of the black sky, flowing down in single drops to feed the great pool of fire below.

"There they are, Dominique — the great buildings. The skyscrapers. Do you remember? They were the first link between us. We're both in love with them, you and I."

She thought she should resent his right to say it. But she felt no resentment.

"Yes, Gail. I'm in love with them."

She looked at the vertical threads of light that were the Cord Building, she raised her fingers off the parapet, just enough to touch the place of its unseen form on the distant sky. She felt no reproach from it.

"I like to see a man standing at the foot of a skyscraper," he said. "It makes him no bigger than an ant — isn't that the correct bromide for the occasion? The God-damn fools! It's man who made it — the whole incredible mass of stone and steel. It doesn't dwarf him, it makes him greater than the structure. It reveals his true dimensions to the world. What we love about these buildings, Dominique, is the creative faculty, the heroic in man."

"Do you love the heroic in man, Gail?"

"I love to think of it. I don't believe it."

She leaned against the parapet and watched the green lights stretched in a long straight line far below. She said:

"I wish I could understand you."

"I thought I should be quite obvious. I've never hidden anything from you."

He watched the electric signs that flashed in disciplined spasms over the black river. Then he pointed to a blurred light, far to the south, a faint reflection of blue.

"That's the Banner Building. See, over there? — that blue light. I've done so many things, but I've missed one, the most important. There's no Wynand Building in New York. Some day I'll build a new home for the Banner. It will be the greatest structure of the city and it will bear my name. I started in a miserable dump, and the paper was called the Gazette. I was only a stooge for some very filthy people. But I thought, then, of the Wynand Building that would rise some day. I've thought of it all the years since."

"Why haven't you built it?"

"I wasn't ready for it."

"Why?"

"I'm not ready for it now. I don't know why. I know only that it's very important to me. It will be the final symbol. I'll know the right time when it comes."

He turned to look out to the west, to a path of dim scattered lights. He pointed:

"That's where I was born. Hell's Kitchen." She listened attentively; he seldom spoke of his beginning. "I was sixteen when I stood on a roof and looked at the city, like tonight. And decided what I would be."

The quality of his voice became a line underscoring the moment, saying: Take notice, this is important. Not looking at him, she thought this was what he had waited for, this should give her the answer, the key to him. Years ago, thinking of Gail Wynand, she had wondered how such a man faced his life and his work; she expected boasting and a hidden sense of shame, or impertinence flaunting its own guilt. She looked at him. His head lifted, his eyes level on the sky before him, he conveyed none of the things she had expected; he conveyed a quality incredible in this connection: a sense of gallantry.

She knew it was a key, but it made the puzzle greater. Yet something within her understood, knew the use of that key and made her speak.

"Gail, fire Ellsworth Toohey."

He turned to her, bewildered.

"Why?"

"Gail, listen." Her voice had an urgency she had never shown in speaking to him. "I've never wanted to stop Toohey. I've even helped him. I thought he was what the world deserved. I haven't tried to save anything from him ... or anyone. I never thought it would be the Banner — the Banner which he fits best — that I'd want to save from him."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"Gail, when I married you, I didn't know I'd come to feel this kind of loyalty to you. It contradicts everything I've done, it contradicts so much more than I can tell you — it's a sort of catastrophe for me, a turning point — don't ask me why — it will take me years to understand — I know only that this is what I owe you. Fire Ellsworth Toohey. Get him out before it's too late. You've broken many much less vicious men and much less dangerous. Fire Toohey, go after him and don't rest until you've destroyed every last bit of him."

"Why? Why should you think of him just now?"

"Because I know what he's after."

"What is he after?"

"Control of the Wynand papers."

He laughed aloud; it was not derision or indignation; just pure gaiety greeting the point of a silly joke.

"Gail ... " she said helplessly.

"Oh for God's sake, Dominique! And here I've always respected your judgment."

"You've never understood Toohey."

"And I don't care to. Can you see me going after Ellsworth Toohey? A tank to eliminate a bedbug? Why should I fire Elsie? He's the kind that makes money for me. People love to read his twaddle. I don't fire good booby-traps like that. He's as valuable to me as a piece of flypaper."

"That's the danger. Part of it."

"His wonderful following? I've had bigger and better sob-sisters on my payroll. When a few of them had to be kicked out, that was the end of them. Their popularity stopped at the door of the Banner. But the Banner went on."

"It's not his popularity. It's the special nature of it. You can't fight him on his terms. You're only a tank — and that's a very clean, innocent weapon. An honest weapon that goes first, out in front, and mows everything down or takes every counterblow. He's a corrosive gas. The kind that eats lungs out. I think there really is a secret to the core of evil and he has it. I don't know what it is. I know how he uses it and what he's after."

"Control of the Wynand papers?"

"Control of the Wynand papers — as one of the means to an end."

"What end?"

"Control of the world."

He said with patient disgust: "What is this, Dominique? What sort of gag and what for?"

"I'm serious, Gail. I'm terribly serious."

"Control of the world, my dear, belongs to men like me. The Tooheys of this earth wouldn't know how to dream about it."

"I'll try to explain. It's very difficult. The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see. But if you'll listen ... "

"I won't listen. You'll forgive me, but discussing the idea of Ellsworth Toohey as a threat to me is ridiculous. Discussing it seriously is offensive."

"Gail, I ... "

"No. Darling, I don't think you really understand much about the Banner. And I don't want you to. I don't want you to take any part in it. Forget it. Leave the Banner to me."

"Is it a demand, Gail?"

"It's an ultimatum."

"All right."

"Forget it. Don't go acquiring horror complexes about anyone as big as Ellsworth Toohey. It's not like you."

"All right, Gail. Let's go in. It's too cold for you here without an overcoat."

He chuckled softly — it was the kind of concern she had never shown for him before. He took her hand and kissed her palm, holding it against his face.

For many weeks, when left alone together, they spoke little and never about each other. But it was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words. They would be in a room together in the evening, saying nothing, content to feel each other's presence. They would look at each other suddenly — and both would smile, the smile like hands clasped.

Then, one evening, she knew he would speak. She sat at her dressing-table. He came in and stood leaning against the wall beside her. He looked at her hands, at her naked shoulders, but she felt as if he did not see her; he was looking at something greater than the beauty of her body, greater than his love for her; he was looking at himself — and this, she knew, was the one incomparable tribute.

"I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival ... I've given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need ... " She heard Roark's words, Roark's voice speaking for Gail Wynand — and she felt no sense of treason to Roark in using the words of his love for the love of another man.

"Gail," she said gently, "some day I'll have to ask your forgiveness for having married you."

He shook his head slowly, smiling. She said:

"I wanted you to be my chain to the world. You've become my defense, instead. And that makes my marriage dishonest."

"No. I told you I would accept any reason you chose."

"But you've changed everything for me. Or was it I that changed it? I don't know. We've done something strange to each other. I've given you what I wanted to lose. That special sense of living I thought this marriage would destroy for me. The sense of life as exaltation. And you — you've done all the things I would have done. Do you know how much alike we are?"

"I knew that from the first."

"But it should have been impossible. Gail, I want to remain with you now — for another reason. To wait for an answer. I think when I learn to understand what you are, I'll understand myself. There is an answer. There is a name for the thing we have in common. I don't know it. I know it's very important."

"Probably. I suppose I should want to understand it. But I don't. I can't care about anything now. I can't even be afraid."

She looked up at him and said very calmly:

"I am afraid, Gail."

"Of what, dearest?"

"Of what I'm doing to you."

"Why?"

"I don't love you, Gail."

"I can't care even about that."

She dropped her head and he looked down at the hair that was like a pale helmet of polished metal.

"Dominique."

She raised her face to him obediently.

"I love you, Dominique. I love you so much that nothing can matter to me — not even you. Can you understand that? Only my love — not your answer. Not even your indifference. I've never taken much from the world. I haven't wanted much. I've never really wanted anything. Not in the total, undivided way, not with the kind of desire that becomes an ultimatum, 'yes' or 'no,' and one can't accept the 'no' without ceasing to exist. That's what you are to me. But when one reaches that stage, it's not the object that matters, it's the desire. Not you, but I. The ability to desire like that. Nothing less is worth feeling or honoring. And I've never felt that before. Dominique, I've never known how to say 'mine' about anything. Not in the sense I say it about you. Mine. Did you call it a sense of life as exaltation? You said that. You understand. I can't be afraid. I love you, Dominique — I love you — you're letting me say it now — I love you."

She reached over and took the cablegram off her mirror. She crumpled it, her fingers twisting slowly in a grinding motion against her palm. He stood listening to the crackle of the paper. She leaned forward, opened her hand over the wastebasket, and let the paper drop. Her hand remained still for a moment, the fingers extended, slanting down, as they had opened.