"Good morning."  She looked at him across the living room from the threshold of her door. In the windows behind him, the mountains had that tinge of silver-pink which seems brighter than daylight, with the promise of a light to come. The sun. had risen somewhere over the earth, but it had not reached the top of the barrier, and the sky was glowing in its stead, announcing its motion. She had heard the joyous greeting to the sunrise, which was not the song of birds, but the ringing of the telephone a moment ago; she saw the start of day, not in the shining green of the branches outside, but in the glitter of chromium on the stove, the sparkle of a glass ashtray on a table, and the crisp whiteness of his shirt sleeves. Irresistibly, she heard the sound of a smile in her own voice, matching his, as she answered: "Good morning."  He was gathering notes of penciled calculations from his desk and stuffing them into his pocket. "I have to go down to the powerhouse," he said. "They've just phoned me that they're having trouble with the ray screen. Your plane seems to have knocked it off key. I'll be back in half an hour and then I'll cook our breakfast."  It was the casual simplicity of his voice, the manner of taking her presence and their domestic routine for granted, as if it were of no significance to them, that gave her the sense of an underscored significance and the feeling that he knew it.  She answered as casually, "If you'll bring me the cane I left in the car, I'll have breakfast ready for you by the time you come back."  He glanced at her with a slight astonishment; his eyes moved from her bandaged ankle to the short sleeves of the blouse that left her arms bare to display the heavy bandage on her elbow. But the transparent blouse, the open collar, the hair falling down to the shoulders that seemed innocently naked under a thin film of cloth, made her look like a schoolgirl, not an invalid, and her posture made the bandages look irrelevant.  He smiled, not quite at her, but as if in amusement at some sudden memory of his own. "If you wish," he said.  It was strange to be left alone in his house. Part of it was an emotion she had never experienced before: an awed respect that made her hesitantly conscious of her hands, as if to touch any object around her would be too great an intimacy. The other part was a reckless sense of ease, a sense of being at home in this place, as if she owned its owner.  It was strange to feel so pure a joy in the simple task of preparing a breakfast. The work seemed an end in itself, as if the motions of filling a coffee pot, squeezing oranges, slicing bread were performed for their own sake, for the sort of pleasure one expects, but seldom finds, in the motions of dancing. It startled her to realize that she had not experienced this kind of pleasure in her work since her days at the operator's desk in Rockdale Station.  She was setting the table, when she saw the figure of a man hurrying up the path to the house, a swift, agile figure that leaped over boulders with the casual ease of a flight. He threw the door open, calling, "Hey, John!"-and stopped short as he saw her. He wore a dark blue sweater and slacks, he had gold hair and a face of such shocking perfection of beauty that she stood still, staring at him, not in admiration, at first, but in simple disbelief.  He looked at her as if he had not expected to find a woman in this house. Then she saw a look of recognition melting into a different kind of astonishment, part amusement, part triumph melting into a chuckle.  "Oh, have you joined us?" he asked.  "No," she answered dryly, "I haven't. I'm a scab."  He laughed, like an adult at a child who uses technological words beyond its understanding. "If you know what you're saying, you know that it's not possible," he said. "Not here."  "I crashed the gate. Literally."  He looked at her bandages, weighing the question, his glance almost insolent in its open curiosity. "When?"  "Yesterday."  "How?"  "In a plane."  "What were you doing in a plane in this part of the country?"  He had the direct, imperious manner of an aristocrat or a roughneck; he looked like one and was dressed like the other. She considered him for a moment, deliberately letting him wait. "I was trying to land on a prehistorical mirage," she answered. "And I have."  "You are a scab," he said, and chuckled, as if grasping all the implications of the problem. "Where's John?"  "Mr. Galt is at the powerhouse. He should be back any moment."  He sat down in an armchair, asking no permission, as if he were at home. She turned silently to her work. He sat watching her movements with an open grin, as if the sight of her laying out cutlery on a kitchen table were the spectacle of some special paradox.  "What did Francisco say when he saw you here?" he asked.  She turned to him with a slight jolt, but answered evenly, "He is not here yet."  "Not yet?" He seemed startled. "Are you sure?"  "So I was told."  He lighted a cigarette. She wondered, watching him, what profession he had chosen, loved and abandoned in order to join this valley. She could make no guess; none seemed to fit; she caught herself in the preposterous feeling of wishing that he had no profession at all, because any work seemed too dangerous for his incredible kind of beauty. It was an impersonal feeling, she did not look at him as at a man, but as at an animated work of art-and it seemed to be a stressed indignity of the outer world that a perfection such as his should be subjected to the shocks, the strains, the scars reserved for any man who loved his work.  But the feeling seemed the more preposterous, because the lines of his face had the sort of hardness for which no danger on earth was a match, "No, Miss Taggart," he said suddenly, catching her glance, "you've never seen me before."  She was shocked to realize that she had been studying him openly.  "How do you happen to know who I am?" she asked.  "First, I've seen your pictures in the papers many times. Second, you're the only woman left in the outer world, to the best of our knowledge, who'd be allowed to enter Galt's Gulch, Third, you're the only woman who'd have the courage-and prodigality-still to remain a scab."  "What made you certain that I was a scab?"  "If you weren't, you'd know that it's not this valley, but the view of life held by men in the outer world that is a prehistorical mirage."  They heard the sound of the motor and saw the car stopping below, in front of the house. She noticed the swiftness with which he rose to his feet at the sight of Galt in the car; if it were not for the obvious personal eagerness, it would have looked like an instinctive gesture of military respect.  She noticed the way Galt stopped, when he entered and saw his visitor. She noticed that Galt smiled, but that his voice was oddly low, almost solemn, as if weighted with unconfessed relief, when he said very quietly, "Hello."  "Hi, John," said the visitor gaily.  She noticed that their handshake came an instant too late and lasted an instant too long, like the handshake of men who had not been certain that their previous meeting would not be their last.  Galt turned to her. "Have you met?" he asked, addressing them both.  "Not exactly," said the visitor.  "Miss Taggart, may I present Ragnar Danneskjold?"  She knew what her face had looked like, when she heard Danneskjold's voice as from a great distance: "You don't have to be frightened, Miss Taggart .I'm not dangerous to anyone in Galt's Gulch."  She could only shake her head, before she recaptured her voice to say, "It's not what you're doing to anyone . . . it's what they're doing to you. . . . "  His laughter swept her out of her moment's stupor, "Be careful, Miss Taggart. If that's how you're beginning to feel, you won't remain a scab for long." He added, "But you ought to start by adopting the right things from the people in Galt's Gulch, not their mistakes: they've spent twelve years worrying about me-needlessly." He glanced at Galt.  "When did you get in?" asked Galt.  "Late last night."  "Sit down. You're going to have breakfast with us."  "But where's Francisco? Why isn't he here yet?"  "I don't know," said Galt, frowning slightly. "I asked at the airport, just now. Nobody's heard from him."  As she turned to the kitchen, Galt moved to follow. "No," she said, "it's my job today."  "Let me help you."  "This is the place where one doesn't ask for help, isn't it?"  He smiled. "That's right."  She had never experienced the pleasure of motion, of walking as if her feet had no weight to carry, as if the support of the cane in her hand were merely a superfluous touch of elegance, the pleasure of feeling her steps trace swift, straight lines, of sensing the faultless, spontaneous precision of her gestures-as she experienced it while placing their food on the table in front of the two men. Her bearing told them that she knew they were watching her-she held her head like an actress on a stage, like a woman in a ballroom, like the winner of a silent contest.  "Francisco will be glad to know that it's you who were his stand-in today," said Danneskjold, when she joined them at the table.  "His what?"  "You see, today is June first, and the three of us-John, Francisco and I-have had breakfast together on every June first for twelve years."  "Here?"  "Not when we started. But here, ever since this house was built eight years ago." He shrugged, smiling. "For a man who has more centuries of tradition behind him than I have, it's odd that Francisco should be the first to break our own tradition."  "And Mr. Galt?" she asked. "How many centuries does he have behind him?"  "John? None at all. None behind him-but all of those ahead."  "Never mind the centuries," said Galt. "Tell me what sort of year you've had behind you. Lost any men?"  "No."  "Lost any of your time?"  "You mean, was I wounded? No. I haven't had a scratch since that one time, ten years ago, when I was still an amateur, which you ought to forget by now. I wasn't in any danger whatever, this year-in fact, I was much more safe than if I were running a small-town drugstore under Directive 10-289."  "Lost any battles?"  "No. The losses were all on the other side, this year. The looters lost most of their ships to me-and most of their men to you. You've had a good year, too, haven't you? I know, I've kept track of it. Since our last breakfast together, you got everyone you wanted from the state of Colorado, and a few others besides, such as Ken Danagger, who was a great prize to get. But let me tell you about a still greater one, who is almost yours. You're going to get him soon, because he's hanging by a thin thread and is just about ready to fall at your feet. He's a man who saved my life-so you can see how far he's gone."  Galt leaned back, his eyes narrowing. "So you weren't in any danger whatever, were you?"  Danneskjold laughed. "Oh, I took a slight risk. It was worth it. It was the most enjoyable encounter I've ever had. I've been waiting to tell you about it in person. It's a story you'll want to hear. Do you know who the man was? Hank Rearden. I-"  "No!"  It was Galt's voice; it was a command; the brief snap of sound had a tinge of violence neither of them had ever heard from him before.  "What?" asked Danneskjold softly, incredulously.  "Don't tell me about it now."  "But you've always said that Hank Rearden was the one man you wanted to see here most."  "I still do. But you'll tell me later."  She studied Galt's face intently, but she could find no clue, only a closed, impersonal look, either of determination or of control, that tightened the skin of his cheekbones and the line of his mouth. No matter what he knew about her, she thought, the only knowledge that could explain this, was a knowledge he had had no way of acquiring.  "You've met Hank Rearden?" she asked, turning to Danneskjold.  "And he saved your life?"  "Yes."  "I want to hear about it."  "I don't," said Galt.  "Why not?"  "You're not one of us, Miss Taggart."  "I see." She smiled, with a faint touch of defiance. "Were you thinking that I might prevent you from getting Hank Rearden?"  "No, that was not what I was thinking,"  She noticed that Danneskjold was studying Galt's face, as if he, too, found the incident inexplicable. Galt held his glance, deliberately and openly, as if challenging him to find the explanation and promising that he would fail. She knew that Danneskjold had failed, when she saw a faint crease of humor softening Galt's eyelids.  "What else," asked Galt, "have you accomplished this year?"  "I've defied the law of gravitation."  "You've always done that. In what particular form now?"  "In the form of a flight from mid-Atlantic to Colorado in a plane loaded with gold beyond the safety point of its capacity. Wait till Midas sees the amount I have to deposit. My customers, this year, will become richer by- Say, have you told Miss Taggart that she's one of my customers?"  "No, not yet You may tell her, if you wish."  "I'm-What did you say I am?" she asked.  "Don't be shocked, Miss Taggart," said Danneskjold. "And don't object. I'm used to objections. I'm a sort of freak here, anyway. None of them approve of my particular method of fighting our battle. John doesn't, Dr. Akston doesn't. They think that my life is too valuable for it. But, you see, my father was a bishop-and of all his teachings there was only one sentence that I accepted: 'All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.' "  "What do you mean?"  "That violence is not practical. If my fellow men believe that the force of the combined tonnage of their muscles is a practical means to rule me-let them learn the outcome of a contest in which there's nothing but brute force on one side, and force ruled by a mind, on the other. Even John grants me that in our age I had the moral right to choose the course I've chosen. I am doing just what he is doing-only in my own way. He is withdrawing man's spirit from the looters, I'm withdrawing the products of man's spirit. He is depriving them of reason, I'm depriving them of wealth. He is draining the soul of the world, I'm draining its body. His is the lesson they have to learn, only I'm impatient and I'm hastening their scholastic progress. But, like John, I'm simply complying with their moral code and refusing to grant them a double standard at my expense. Or at Rearden's expense. Or at yours."  "What are you talking about?"  "About a method of taxing the income taxers. All methods of taxation are complex, but this one is very simple, because it's the naked essence of all the others. Let me explain it to you."  She listened. She heard a sparkling voice reciting, in the tone of a dryly meticulous bookkeeper, a report about financial transfers, bank accounts, income-tax returns, as if he were reading the dusty pages of a ledger-a ledger where every entry was made by means of offering his own blood as the collateral to be drained at any moment, at any slip of his bookkeeping pen. As she listened, she kept seeing the perfection of his face-and she kept thinking that this was the head on which the world had placed a price of millions for the purpose of delivering it to the rot of death. . . . The face she had thought too beautiful for the scars of a productive career-she kept thinking numbly, missing half his words-the face too beautiful to risk. . . . Then it struck her that his physical perfection was only a simple illustration, a childish lesson given to her in crudely obvious terms on the nature of the outer world and on the fate of any human value in a subhuman age. Whatever the justice or the evil of his course, she thought, how could they . . . no! she thought, his course was just, and this was the horror of it, that there was no other course for justice to select, that she could not condemn him, that she could neither approve nor utter a word of reproach.  ". . . and the names of my customers, Miss Taggart, were chosen slowly, one by one. I had to be certain of the nature of their character and career. On my list of restitution, your name was one of the first."  She forced herself to keep her face expressionlessly tight, and she answered only, "I see."  "Your account is one of the last left unpaid. It is here, at the Mulligan Bank, to be claimed by you on the day when you join us."  "I see."  "Your account, however, is not as large as some of the others, even though huge sums were extorted from you by force in the past twelve years. You will find-as it is marked on the copies o￡ your income-tax returns which Mulligan will hand over to you-that I have refunded only those taxes which you paid on the salary you earned as Operating Vice-President, but not the taxes you paid on your income from your Taggart Transcontinental stock. You deserved every penny of that stock, and in the days of your father I would have refunded every penny of your profit-but under your brother's management, Taggart Transcontinental has taken its share of the looting, it has made profits by force, by means of government favors, subsidies, moratoriums, directives. You were not responsible for it, you were, in fact, the greatest victim of that policy-but I refund only the money which was made by pure productive ability, not the money any part of which was loot taken by force."  "I see."  They had finished their breakfast. Danneskjold lighted a cigarette and watched her for an instant through the first jet of smoke, as if he knew the violence of the conflict in her mind-then he grinned at Galt and rose to his feet.  "I'll run along," he said. "My wife is waiting for me."  "What?" she gasped.  "My wife," he repeated gaily, as if he had not understood the reason of her shock.  "Who is your wife?"  "Kay Ludlow."  The implications that struck her were more than she could bear to consider. "When . . . when were you married?"  "Four years ago."  "How could you show yourself anywhere long enough to go through a wedding ceremony?"  "We were married here, by Judge Narragansett."  "How can"-she tried to stop, but the words burst involuntarily, in helplessly indignant protest, whether against him, fate or the outer world, she could not tell-"how can she live through eleven months of thinking that you, at any moment, might be . . . ?" She did not finish.  He was smiling, but she saw the enormous solemnity of that which he and his wife had needed to earn their right to this kind of smile. "She can live through it, Miss Taggart, because we do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it-and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life."  Galt accompanied him to the door, then came back, sat down at the table and in a leisurely manner reached for another cup of coffee.  She shot to her feet, as if flung by a jet of pressure breaking a safety valve. "Do you think that I'll ever accept his money?"  He waited until the curving streak of coffee had filled his cup, then glanced up at her and answered, "Yes, I think so."  "Well, I won't! I won't let him risk his life for it!"  "You have no choice about that."  "I have the choice never to claim it!"  "Yes, you have."  "Then it will lie in that bank till doomsday!"  "No, it won't. If you don't claim it, some part of it-a very small part-will be turned over to me in your name."  "In my name? Why?"  "To pay for your room and board."  She stared at him, her look of anger switching to bewilderment, then dropped slowly back on her chair.  He smiled. "How long did you think you were going to stay here, Miss Taggart?" He saw her startled look of helplessness. "You haven't thought of it? I have. You're going to stay here for a month. For the one month of our vacation, like the rest of us. I am not asking for your consent-you did not ask for ours when you came here. You broke our rules, so you'll have to take the consequences. Nobody leaves the valley during this month. I could let you go, of course, but I won't. There's no rule demanding that I hold you, but by forcing your way here, you've given me the right to any choice I make-and I'm going to hold you simply because I want you here. If, at the end of a month, you decide that you wish to go back, you will be free to do so. Not until then."  She sat straight, the planes of her face relaxed, the shape of her mouth softened by the faint, purposeful suggestion of a smile; it was the dangerous smile of an adversary, but her eyes were coldly brilliant and veiled at once, like the eyes of an adversary who fully intends to fight, but hopes to lose.  "Very well," she said.  "I shall charge you for your room and board-it is against our rules to provide the unearned sustenance of another human being. Some of us have wives and children, but there is a mutual trade involved in that, and a mutual payment"-he glanced at her-"of a kind I am not entitled to collect. So I shall charge you fifty cents a day and you will pay me when you accept the account that lies in your name at the Mulligan Bank. If you don't accept the account, Mulligan will charge your debt against it and he will give me the money when I ask for it."  "I shall comply with your terms," she answered; her voice had the shrewd, confident, deliberating slowness of a trader. "But I shall not permit the use of that money for my debts."  "How else do you propose to comply?"  "I propose to earn my room and board."  "By what means?"  "By working."  "In what capacity?"  "In the capacity of your cook and housemaid."  For the first time, she saw him take the shock of the unexpected, in a manner and with a violence she had not foreseen. It was only an explosion of laughter on his part-but he laughed as if he were hit beyond his defenses, much beyond the immediate meaning of her words; she felt that she had struck his past, tearing loose some memory and meaning of his own which she could not know. He laughed as if he were seeing some distant image, as if he were laughing in its face, as if this were his victory-and hers.  "If you will hire me," she said, her face severely polite, her tone harshly clear, impersonal and businesslike, "I shall cook your meals, clean your house, do your laundry and perform such other duties as are required of a servant-in exchange for my room, board and such money as I will need for some items of clothing. I may be slightly handicapped by my injuries for the next few days, but that will not last and I will be able to do the job fully."  "Is that what you want to do?" he asked.  "That is what I want to do-" she answered, and stopped before she uttered the rest of the answer in her mind: more than anything else in the world.  He was still smiling, it was a smile of amusement, but it was as if amusement could be transmuted into some shining glory. "All right, Miss Taggart," he said, "I'll hire you."  She inclined her head in a dryly formal acknowledgment. "Thank you,"  "I will pay you ten dollars a month, in addition to your room and board."  "Very well."  "I shall be the first man in this valley to hire a servant." He got up, reached into his pocket and threw a five-dollar gold piece down on the table. "As advance on your wages," he said.  She was startled to discover, as her hand reached for the gold piece, that she felt the eager, desperate, tremulous hope of a young girl on her first job: the hope that she would be able to deserve it.  "Yes, sir," she said, her eyes lowered.  Owen Kellogg arrived on the afternoon of her third day in the valley.  She did not know which shocked him most: the sight of her standing on the edge of the airfield as he descended from the plane-the sight of her clothes: her delicate, transparent blouse, tailored by the most expensive shop in New York, and the wide, cotton-print skirt she had bought in the valley for sixty cents-her cane, her bandages or the basket of groceries on her arm.  He descended among a group of men, he saw her, he stopped, then ran to her as if flung forward by some emotion so strong that, whatever its nature, it looked like terror.  "Miss Taggart . . ." he whispered-and said nothing else, while she laughed, trying to explain how she had come to beat him to his destination.  He listened, as if it were irrelevant, and then he uttered the thing from which he had to recover, "But we thought you were dead."  "Who thought it?"  "All of us . . . I mean, everybody in the outside world."  Then she suddenly stopped smiling, while his voice began to recapture his story and his first sound of joy. "Miss Taggart, don't you remember? You told me to phone Winston, Colorado, and to tell them that you'd be there by noon of the next day. That was to be the day before yesterday, May thirty-first. But you did not reach Winston-and by late afternoon, the news was on all the radios that you were lost in a plane crash somewhere in the Rocky Mountains."  She nodded slowly, grasping the events she had not thought of considering.  "I heard it aboard the Comet," he said. "At a small station in the middle of New Mexico, The conductor held us there for an hour, while I helped him to check the story on long-distance phones. He was hit by the news just as I was. They all were-the train crew, the station agent, the switchmen. They huddled around me while I called the city rooms of newspapers in Denver and New York. We didn't learn much.  Only that you had left the Afton airfield just before dawn on May thirty-first, that you seemed to be following some stranger's plane, that the attendant had seen you go off southeast-and that nobody had seen you since . . . And that searching parties were combing the Rockies for the wreckage of your plane."  She asked involuntarily, "Did the Comet reach San Francisco?"  "I don't know. She was crawling north through Arizona, when I gave up. There were too many delays, too many things going wrong, and a total confusion of orders. I got off and spent the night hitchhiking my way to Colorado, bumming rides on trucks, on buggies, on horse carts, to get there on time-to get to our meeting place, I mean, where we gather for Midas' ferry plane to pick us up and bring us here."  She started walking slowly up the path toward the car she had left in front of Hammond's Grocery Market. Kellogg followed, and when he spoke again, his voice dropped a little, slowing down with their steps, as if there were something they both wished to delay.  "I got a job for Jeff AlLen," he said; his voice had the peculiarly solemn tone proper for saying: I have carried out your last will. "Your agent at Laurel grabbed him and put him to work the moment we got there. The agent needed every able-bodied-no, able-minded-man he could find."  They had reached the car, but she did not get in.  "Miss Taggart, you weren't hurt badly, were you? Did you say you crashed, but it wasn't serious?"  "No, not serious at all. I'll be able to get along without Mr. Mulligan's car by tomorrow-and in a day or two I won't need this thing, either." She swung her cane and tossed it contemptuously into the car.  They stood in silence; she was waiting.  "The last long-distance call I made from that station in New Mexico," he said slowly, "was to Pennsylvania. I spoke to Hank Rearden. I told him everything I knew. He listened, and then there was a pause, and then he said, 'Thank you for calling me.' " Kellogg's eyes were lowered; he added, "I never want to hear that kind of pause again as long as I live."  He raised his eyes to hers; there was no reproach in his glance, only the knowledge of that which he had not suspected when he heard her request, but had guessed since.  "Thank you," she said, and threw the door of the car open. "Can I give you a lift? I have to get back and get dinner ready before my employer comes home."  It was in the first moment of returning to Galt's house, of standing alone in the silent, sun-filled room, that she faced the full meaning of what she felt. She looked at the window, at the mountains barring the sky in the east. She thought of Hank Rearden as he sat at his desk, now, two thousand miles away, his face tightened into a retaining wall against agony, as it had been tightened under all the blows of all his years-and she felt a desperate wish to fight his battle, to fight for him, for his past, for that tension of his face and the courage that fed it-as she wanted to fight for the Comet that crawled by a last effort across a desert on a crumbling track. She shuddered, closing her eyes, feeling as if she were guilty of double treason, feeling as if she were suspended in space between this valley and the rest of the earth, with no right to either.  The feeling vanished when she sat facing Galt across the dinner table. He was watching her, openly and with an untroubled look, as if her presence were normal-and as if the sight of her were all he wished to allow into his consciousness.  She leaned back a little, as if complying with the meaning of his glance, and said dryly, efficiently, in deliberate denial, "I have checked your shirts and found one with two buttons missing, and another with the left elbow worn through. Do you wish me to mend them?"  "Why, yes-if you can do it."  "I can do it."  It did not seem to alter the nature of his glance; it merely seemed to stress its satisfaction, as if this were what he had wished her to say -except that she was not certain whether satisfaction was the name for the thing she saw in his eyes and fully certain that he had not wished her to say anything.  Beyond the window, at the edge of the table, storm clouds had wiped out the last remnants of light in the eastern sky. She wondered why she felt a sudden reluctance to look out, why she felt as if she wanted to cling to the golden patches of light on the wood of the table, on the buttered crust of the rolls, on the copper coffee pot, on Galt's hair -to cling as to a small island on the edge of a void.  Then she heard her own voice asking suddenly, involuntarily, and she knew that this was the treason she had wanted to escape, "Do you permit any communication with the outside world?"  "No."  "Not any? Not even a note without return address?"  "No."  "Not even a message, if no secret of yours were given away?"  "Not from here. Not during this month. Not to outsiders at any time."  She noticed that she was avoiding his eyes, and she forced herself to lift her head and face him. His glance had changed; it was watchful, unmoving, implacably perceptive. He asked, looking at her as if he knew the reason of her query, "Do you wish to ask for a special exception?"  "No," she answered, holding his glance.  Next morning, after breakfast, when she sat in her room, carefully placing a patch on the sleeve of Galt's shirt, with her door closed, not to let him see her fumbling effort at an unfamiliar task, she heard the sound of a car stopping in front of the house.  She heard Galt's steps hurrying across the living room, she heard him jerk the entrance door open and call out with the joyous anger of relief: "It's about time!"  She rose to her feet, but stopped: she heard his voice, its tone abruptly changed and grave, as if in answer to the shock of some sight confronting him: "What's the matter?"  "Hello, John," said a clear, quiet voice that sounded steady, but weighted with exhaustion.  She sat down on her bed, feeling suddenly drained of strength: the voice was Francisco's.  She heard Galt asking, his tone severe with concern, "What is it?"  "I'll tell you afterwards."  "Why are you so late?"  "I have to leave again in an hour."  "To leave?"  "John, I just came to tell you that I won't be able to stay here this year."  There was a pause, then Galt asked gravely, his voice low, "Is it as bad as that-whatever it is?"  "Yes. I . . . I might be back before the month is over. I don't know." He added, with the sound of a desperate effort, "I don't know whether to hope to be done with it quickly or . . . or not."  "Francisco, could you stand a shock right now?"  "I? Nothing could shock me now."  "There's a person, here, in my guest room, whom you have to see. It will be a shock to you, so I think I'd better warn you in advance that this person is still a scab."  "What? A scab? In your house?"  "Let me tell you how-"  "That's something I want to see for myself!"  She heard Francisco's contemptuous chuckle and the rush of his steps, she saw her door flung open, and she noticed dimly that it was Galt who closed it, leaving them alone.  She did not know how long Francisco stood looking at her, because the first moment that she grasped fully was when she saw him on his knees, holding onto her, his face pressed to her legs, the moment when she felt as if the shudder that ran through his body and left him still, had run into hers and made her able to move.  She saw, in astonishment, that her hand was moving gently over his hair, while she was thinking that she had no right to do it and feeling as if a current of serenity were flowing from her hand, enveloping them both, smoothing the past. He did not move, he made no sound, as if the act of holding her said everything he had to say.  When he raised his head, he looked as she had felt when she had opened her eyes in the valley: he looked as if no pain had ever existed in the world. He was laughing.  "Dagny, Dagny, Dagny"-his voice sounded, not as if a confession resisted for years were breaking out, but as if he were repeating the long since known, laughing at the pretense that it had ever been unsaid -"of course I love you. Were you afraid when he made me say it? I'll say it as often as you wish-I love you, darling, I love you, I always will-don't be afraid for me, I don't care if I'll never have you again, what does that matter?-you're alive and you're here and you know everything now. And it's so simple, isn't it? Do you see what it was and why I had to desert you?" His arm swept out to point at the valley. "There it is-it's your earth, your kingdom, your kind of world-Dagny, I've always loved you and that I deserted you, that was my love."  He took her hands and pressed them to his lips and held them, not moving, not as a kiss, but as a long moment of rest-as if the effort of speech were a distraction from the fact of her presence, and as if he were torn by too many things to say, by the pressure of all the words stored in the silence of years.  "The women I chased-you didn't believe that, did you? I've never touched one of them-but I think you knew it, I think you've known it all along. The playboy-it was a part that I had to play in order not to let the looters suspect me while I was destroying d'Anconia Copper in plain sight of the whole world. That's the joker in their system, they're out to fight any man of honor and ambition, but let them see a worthless rotter and they think he's a friend, they think he's safe-safe!-that's their view of life, but are they learning!-are they learning whether evil is safe and incompetence practical! . . .  “Dagny, it was the night when I knew, for the first time, that I loved you-it was then that I knew I had to go. It was when you entered my hotel room, that night, when I saw what you looked like, what you were, what you meant to me-and what awaited you in the future. Had you been less, you might have stopped me for a while. But it was you, you who were the final argument that made me leave you. I asked for your help, that night-against John Galt. But I knew that you were his best weapon against me, though neither you nor he could know it.  “You were everything that he was seeking, everything he told us to live for or die, if necessary. . . . I was ready for him, when he called me suddenly to come to New York, that spring. I had not heard from him for some time. He was fighting the same problem I was. He solved it. . . . Do you remember? It was the time when you did not hear from me for three years. Dagny, when I took over my father's business, when I began to deal with the whole industrial system of the world, it was then that I began to see the nature of the evil I had suspected, but thought too monstrous to believe. I saw the tax-collecting vermin that had grown for centuries like mildew on d'Anconia Copper, draining us by no right that anyone could name-I saw the government regulations passed to cripple me, because I was successful, and to help my competitors, because they were loafing failures-I saw the labor unions who won every claim against me, by reason of my ability to make their livelihood possible-I saw that any man's desire for money he could not earn was regarded as a righteous wish, but if he earned it, it was damned as greed-I saw the politicians who winked at me, telling me not to worry, because I could just work a little harder and outsmart them all. I looked past the profits of the moment, and I saw that the harder I worked, the more I tightened the noose around my throat, I saw that my energy was being poured down a sewer, that the parasites who fed on me were being fed upon in their turn, that they were caught in their own trap-and that there was no reason for it, no answer known to anyone, that the sewer pipes of the world, draining its productive blood, led into some dank fog nobody had dared to pierce, while people merely shrugged and said that life on earth could be nothing but evil. And then I saw that the whole industrial establishment of the world, with all of its magnificent machinery, its thousand-ton furnaces, its transatlantic cables, its mahogany offices, its stock exchanges, its blazing electric signs, its power, its wealth-all of it was run, not by bankers and boards of directors, but by any unshaved humanitarian in any basement beer joint, by any face pudgy with malice, who preached that virtue must be penalized for being virtue, that the purpose of ability is to serve incompetence, that man has no right to exist except for the sake of others. . . . I knew it. I saw no way to fight it. John found the way. There were just the two of us with him, the night when we came to New York in answer to his call, Ragnar and I. He told us what we had to do and what sort of men we had to reach. He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done. He did not ask us to join him at once. He told us to think it over and to weigh everything it would do to our lives. I gave him my answer on the morning of the second day, and Ragnar a few hours later, in the afternoon. . . Dagny, that was the morning after our last night together. I had seen, in a manner of vision that I couldn't escape, what it was that I had to fight for.  “It was for the way you looked that night, for the way you talked about your railroad-for the way you had looked when we tried to see the skyline of New York from the top of a rock over the Hudson-I had to save you, to clear the way for you, to let you find your city-not to let you stumble the years of your life away, struggling on through a poisoned fog, with your eyes still held straight ahead, still looking as they had looked in the sunlight, struggling on to find, at the end of your road, not the towers of a city, but a fat, soggy, mindless cripple performing his enjoyment of life by means of swallowing the gin your life had gone to pay for! You,-to know no joy in order that he may know it? You-to serve as fodder for the pleasure of others? You-as the means for the subhuman as the end? Dagny, that was what I saw and that was what I couldn't let them do to you! Not to you, not to any child who had your kind of look when-he faced the future, not to any man who had your spirit and was able to experience a moment of being proudly, guiltlessly, confidently, joyously alive. That was my love, that state of the human spirit, and I left you to fight for it, and I knew that if I were to lose you, it was still you that I would be winning with every year of the battle. But you see it now, don't you? You've seen this valley. It's the place we set out to reach when we were children, you and I. We've reached it. What else can I ask for now? Just to see you here-did John say you're still a scab?-oh well, it's only a matter of tune, but you'll be one of us, because you've always been, if you don't see it fully, we'll wait, I don't care-so long as you're alive, so long as I don't have to go on flying over the Rockies, looking for the wreckage of your plane!"  She gasped a little, realizing why he had not come to the valley on time.  He laughed. "Don't look like that. Don't look at me as if I were a wound that you're afraid to touch."  "Francisco, I've hurt you in so many different ways-"  "No! No, you haven't hurt me-and he hasn't either, don't say anything about it, it's he who's hurt, but we'll save him and he'll come here, too, where he belongs, and he'll know, and then he, too, will be able to laugh about it. Dagny, I didn't expect you to wait, I didn't hope, I knew the chance I'd taken, and if it had to be anyone, I'm glad it's he."  She closed her eyes, pressing her lips together not to moan.  "Darling, don't! Don't you see that I've accepted it?"  But it isn't-she thought-it isn't he, and I can't tell you the truth, because it's a man who might never hear it from me and whom I might never have.  "Francisco, I did love you-" she said, and caught her breath, shocked, realizing that she had not intended to say it and, simultaneously, that this was not the tense she had wanted to use.  "But you do," he said calmly, smiling. "You still love me-even if there's one expression of it that you'll always feel and want, but will not give me any longer. I'm still what I was, and you'll always see it, and you'll always grant me the same response, even if there's a greater one that you grant to another man. No matter what you feel for him, it will not change what you feel for me, and it won't be treason to either, because it comes from the same root, it's the same payment in answer to the same values. No matter what happens in the future, we'll always be what we were to each other, you and I, because you'll always love me."  "Francisco," she whispered, "do you know that?"  "Of course. Don't you understand it now? Dagny, every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor-by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence-and every achievement is an expression of it. Look around you. Do you see how much is open to us here, on an unobstructed earth? Do you see how much I am free to do, to experience, to achieve? Do you see that all of it is part of what you are to me-as I am part of it for you? And if I'll see you smile with admiration at a new copper smelter that I built, it will be another form of what I felt when I lay in bed beside you. Will I want to sleep with you? Desperately. Will I envy the man who does? Sure. But what does that matter? It's so much-just to have you here, to love you and to be alive."  Her eyes lowered, her face stern, holding her head bowed as in an act of reverence, she said slowly, as if fulfilling a solemn promise, "Will you forgive me?"  He looked astonished, then chuckled gaily, remembering, and answered, "Not yet. There's nothing to forgive, but I'll forgive it when you join us." He rose, he drew her to her feet-and when his arms closed about her, their kiss was the summation of their past, its end and their seal of acceptance.  Galt turned to them from across the living room, when they came out. He had been standing at a window, looking at the valley-and she felt certain that he had stood there all that time. She saw his eyes studying their faces, his glance moving slowly from one to the other.  His face relaxed a little at the sight of the change in Francisco's.  Francisco smiled, asking him, "Why do you stare at me?"  "Do you know what you looked like when you came in?"  "Oh, did I? That's because I hadn't slept for three nights. John, will you invite me to dinner? I want to know how this scab of yours got here, but I think that I might collapse sound asleep in the middle of a sentence-even though right now I feel as if I'll never need any sleep at all-so I think I'd better go home and stay there till evening."  Galt was watching him with a faint smile. "But aren't you going to leave the valley in an hour?"  "What? No . . ." he said mildly, in momentary astonishment. "No!" he laughed exultantly. "I don't have to! That's right, I haven't told you what it was, have I? I was searching for Dagny. For . . . for the wreck of her plane. She'd been reported lost in a crash in the Rockies."  "I see," said Galt quietly.  "I could have thought of anything, except that she would choose to crash in Galt's Gulch," Francisco said happily; he had the tone of that joyous relief which almost relishes the horror of the past, defying it by means of the present. "I kept flying over the district between Afton, Utah, and Winston, Colorado, over every peak and crevice of it, over every remnant of a car in any gully below, and whenever I saw one, I-" He stopped; it looked like a shudder. "Then at night, we went out on foot-the searching parties of railroad men from Winston-we went climbing at random, with no clues, no plan, on and on, until it was daylight again, and-" He shrugged, trying to dismiss it and to smile. "I wouldn't wish it on my worst-" He stopped short; his smile vanished and a dim reflection of the look he had worn for three days came back to his face, as if at the sudden presence of an image he had forgotten.  After a long moment, he turned to Galt. "John," his voice sounded peculiarly solemn, "could we notify those outside that Dagny is alive . . . in case there's somebody who . . . who'd feel as I did?"  Galt was looking straight at him. "Do you wish to give any outsider any relief from the consequences of remaining outside?"  Francisco dropped his eyes, but answered firmly, "No."  "Pity, Francisco?"  "Yes. Forget it. You're right."  Galt turned away with a movement that seemed oddly out of character: it had the unrhythmical abruptness of the involuntary.  He did not turn back; Francisco watched him in astonishment, then asked softly, "What's the matter?"  Galt turned and looked at him for a moment, not answering. She could not identify the emotion that softened the lines of Galt's face: it had the quality of a smile, of gentleness, of pain, and of something greater that seemed to make these concepts superfluous.  "Whatever any of us has paid for this battle," said Galt, "you're the one who's taken the hardest beating, aren't you?"  "Who? I?" Francisco grinned with shocked, incredulous amusement.  "Certainly not! What's the matter with you?" He chuckled and added, "Pity, John?"  "No," said Galt firmly.  She saw Francisco watching him with a faint, puzzled frown-because Galt had said it, looking, not at him, but at her.  The emotional sum that struck her as an immediate impression of Francisco's house, when she entered it for the first time, was not the sum she had once drawn from the sight of its silent, locked exterior. She felt, not a sense of tragic loneliness, but of invigorating brightness. The rooms were bare and crudely simple, the house seemed built with the skill, the decisiveness and the impatience typical of Francisco; it looked like a frontiersman's shanty thrown together to serve as a mere springboard for a long flight into the future-a future where so great a field of activity lay waiting that no time could be wasted on the comfort of its start. The place had the brightness, not of a home, but of a fresh wooden scaffolding erected to shelter the birth of a skyscraper.  Francisco, in shirt sleeves, stood in the middle of his twelve-foot square living room, with the look of a host in a palace. Of all the places where she had ever seen him, this was the background that seemed most properly his. Just as the simplicity of his clothes, added to his bearing, gave him the air of a superlative aristocrat, so the crudeness of the room gave it the appearance of the most patrician retreat; a single royal touch was added to the crudeness: two ancient silver goblets stood in a small niche cut in a wall of bare logs; their ornate design had required the luxury of some craftsman's long and costly labor, more labor than had gone to build the shanty, a design dimmed by the polish of more centuries than had gone to grow the log wall's pines. In the midst of that room, Francisco's easy, natural manner had a touch of quiet pride, as if his smile were silently saying to her: This is what I am and what I have been all these years.  She looked up at the silver goblets.  "Yes," he said, in answer to her silent guess, "they belonged to Sebastian d'Anconia and his wife. That's the only thing I brought here from my palace in Buenos Aires. That, and the crest over the door. It's all I wanted to save. Everything else will go, in a very few months now." He chuckled. "They'll seize it, all of it, the last dregs of d'Anconia Copper, but they'll be surprised. They won't find much for their trouble. And as to that palace, they won't be able to afford even its heating bill."  "And then?" she asked. "Where will you go from there?"  "I? I will go to work for d'Anconia Copper."  "What do you mean?"  "Do you remember that old slogan: ‘The king is dead, long live the king?’ When the carcass of my ancestors' property is out of the way, then my mine will become the young new body of d'Anconia Copper, the kind of property my ancestors had wanted, had worked for, had deserved, but had never owned."  "Your mine? What mine? Where?"  "Here," he said, pointing toward the mountain peaks. "Didn't you know it?"  "No."  "I own a copper mine that the looters won't reach. It's here, in these mountains. I did the prospecting, I discovered it, I broke the first excavation. It was over eight years ago. I was the first man to whom Midas sold land in this valley. I bought that mine. I started it with my own hands, as Sebastian d'Anconia had started. I have a superintendent in charge of it now, who used to be my best metallurgist in Chile. The mine produces all the copper we require. My profits are deposited at the Mulligan Bank. That will be all I'll have, a few months from now. That will be all I'll need." -to conquer the world, was the way his voice sounded on his last sentence-and she marveled at the difference between that sound and the shameful, mawkish tone, half-whine, half-threat, the tone of beggar and thug combined, which the men of their century had given to the word "need."  "Dagny," he was saying, standing at the window, as if looking out at the peaks, not of mountains, but of time, "the rebirth of d'Anconia Copper-and of the world-has to start here, in the United States. This country was the only country in history born, not of chance and blind tribal warfare, but as a rational product of man's mind. This country was built on the supremacy of reason-and, for one magnificent century, it redeemed the world. It will have to do so again. The first step of d'Anconia Copper, as of any other human value, has to come from here-because the rest of the earth has reached the consummation of the beliefs it has held through the ages: mystic faith, the supremacy of the irrational, which has but two monuments at the end of its course: the lunatic asylum and the graveyard. . . . Sebastian d'Anconia committed one error: he accepted a system which declared that the property he had earned by right, was to be his, not by right, but by permission. His descendants paid for that error. I have made the last payment. . . . I think that I will see the day when, growing out from their root in this soil, the mines, the smelters, the ore docks of d'Anconia Copper will spread again through the world and down to my native country, and I will be the first to start my country's rebuilding.  I may see it, but I cannot be certain. No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason. It may be that at the end of my life, I shall have established nothing but this single mine-d'Anconia Copper No. 1, Galt's Gulch, Colorado, U.S.A. But, Dagny, do you remember that my ambition was to double my father's production of copper? Dagny, if at the end of my life, I produce but one pound of copper a year, I will be richer than my father, richer than all my ancestors with all their thousands of tons-because that one pound will be mine by right and will be used to maintain a world that knows it!"  This was the Francisco of their childhood, in bearing, in manner, in the unclouded brilliance of his eyes-and she found herself questioning him about his copper mine, as she had questioned him about his industrial projects on their walks on the shore of the Hudson, recapturing the sense of an unobstructed future.  "I'll take you to see the mine," he said, "as soon as your ankle recovers completely. We have to climb a steep trail to get there, just a mule trail, there's no truck road as yet. Let me show you the new smelter I'm designing. I've been working on it for some time, it's too complex for our present volume of production, but when the mine's output grows to justify it-just take a look at the time, labor and money that it will save!"  They were sitting together on the floor, bending over the sheets of paper he spread before her, studying the intricate sections of the smelter-with the same joyous earnestness they had once brought to the study of scraps in a junk yard.  She leaned forward just as he moved to reach for another sheet, and she found herself leaning against his shoulder.Involuntarily, she held still for one instant, no longer than for a small break in the flow of a single motion, while her eyes rose to his. He was looking down at her, neither hiding what he felt nor implying any further demand. She drew back, knowing that she had felt the same desire as his.  Then, still holding the recaptured sensation of what she had felt for him in the past, she grasped a quality that had always been part of it, now suddenly clear to her for the first time: if that desire was a celebration of one's life, then what she had felt for Francisco had always been a celebration of her future, like a moment of splendor gained in part payment of an unknown, total, affirming some promise to come. In the instant when she grasped it, she knew also the only desire she had ever experienced not in token of the future but of the full and final present. She knew it by means of an image-the image of a man's figure standing at the door of a small granite structure. The final form of the promise that had kept her moving, she thought, was the man who would, perhaps, remain a promise never to be reached.  But this-she thought in consternation-was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach. But she had come to it and she could find no answer.  She could not give him up or give up the world-she thought, looking at Galt, that evening. The answer seemed harder to find in his presence. She felt that no problem existed, that nothing could stand beside the fact of seeing him and nothing would ever have the power to make her leave-and, simultaneously, that she would have no right to look at him if she were to renounce her railroad. She felt that she owned him, that the unnamed had been understood between them from the start-and, simultaneously, that he was able to vanish from her mind and, on some future street of the outside world, to pass her by in unweighted indifference.  She noted that he did not question her about Francisco. When she spoke of her visit, she could find no reaction in his face, neither of approval nor of resentment. It seemed to her that she caught an imperceptible shading in his gravely attentive expression: he looked as if this were a matter about which he did not choose to feel.  Her faint apprehension grew into a question mark, and the question mark turned into a drill, cutting deeper and deeper into her mind through the evenings that followed-when Galt left the house and she remained alone. He went out every other night, after dinner, not telling her where he went, returning at midnight or later. She tried not to allow herself fully to discover with what tension and. restlessness she waited for his return. She did not ask him where he spent his evenings. The reluctance that stopped her was her too urgent desire to know; she kept silent in some dimly intentional form of defiance, half in defiance of him, half of her own anxiety.  She would not acknowledge the things she feared or give them the solid shape of words, she knew them only by the ugly, nagging pull of an unadmitted emotion. Part of it was a savage resentment, of a kind she had never experienced before, which was her answer to the dread that there might be a woman in his life; yet the resentment was softened by some quality of health in the thing she feared, as if the threat could be fought and even, if need be, accepted. But there was another, uglier dread: the sordid shape of self-sacrifice, the suspicion, not to be uttered about him, that he wished to remove himself from her path and let its emptiness force her back to the man who was his best-loved friend.  Days passed before she spoke of it. Then, at dinner, on an evening when he was to leave, she became suddenly aware of the peculiar pleasure she experienced while watching him eat the food she had prepared-and suddenly, involuntarily, as if that pleasure gave her a right she dared not identify, as if enjoyment, not pain, broke her resistance, she heard herself asking him, "What is it you're doing every other evening?"  He answered simply, as if he had taken for granted that she knew it, "Lecturing."  "What?"  "Giving a course of lectures on physics, as I do every year during this month. It's my . . . What are you laughing at?" he asked, seeing the look of relief, of silent laughter that did not seem to be directed at his words-and then, before she answered, he smiled suddenly, as if he had guessed the answer, she saw some particular, intensely personal quality in his smile, which was almost a quality of insolent intimacy-in contrast to the calmly impersonal, casual manner with which he went on. "You know that this is the month when we all trade the achievements of our real professions. Richard Halley is to give concerts, Kay Ludlow is to appear in two plays written by authors who do not write for the outside world-and I give lectures, reporting on the work I've done during the year."  "Free lectures?"  "Certainly not. It's ten dollars per person for the course."  "I want to hear you."  He shook his head. "No. You'll be allowed to attend the concerts, the plays or any form of presentation for your own enjoyment, but not my lectures or any other sale of ideas which you might carry out of this valley. Besides, my customers, or students, are only those who have a practical purpose in taking my course: Dwight Sanders, Lawrence Hammond, Dick McNamara, Owen Kellogg, a few others. I've added one beginner this year: Quentin Daniels."  "Really?" she said, almost with a touch of jealousy. "How can he afford anything that expensive?"  "On credit. I've given him a time-payment plan. He's worth it."  "Where do you lecture?"  "In the hangar, on Dwight Sanders' farm."  "And where do you work during the year?"  "In my laboratory."  She asked cautiously, "Where is your laboratory? Here, in the valley?"  He held her eyes for a moment, letting her see that his glance was amused and that he knew her purpose, then answered, "No."  "You've lived in the outside world for all of these twelve years?"  "Yes."  "Do you"-the thought seemed unbearable-"do you hold some such job as the others?"  "Oh yes." The amusement in his eyes seemed stressed by some special meaning.  "Don't tell me that you're a second assistant bookkeeper!"  "No, I'm not."  "Then what do you do?"  "I hold the kind of job that the world wishes me to hold."  "Where?"  He shook his head. "No, Miss Taggart. If you decide to leave the valley, this is one of the things that you are not to know."  He smiled again with that insolently personal quality which now seemed to say that he knew the threat contained in his answer and what it meant to her, then he rose from the table.  When he had gone, she felt as if the motion of time were an oppressive weight in the stillness of the house, like a stationary, half-solid mass slithering slowly into some faint elongation by a tempo that left her no measure to know whether minutes had passed or hours. She lay half-stretched in an armchair of the living room, crumpled by that heavy, indifferent lassitude which is not the will to laziness, but the frustration of the will to a secret violence that no lesser action can satisfy.  That special pleasure she had felt in watching him eat the food she had prepared-she thought, lying still, her eyes closed, her mind moving, like time, through some realm of veiled slowness-it had been the pleasure of knowing that she had provided him with a sensual enjoyment, that one form of his body's satisfaction had come from her.  . . . There is reason, she thought, why a woman would wish to cook for a man . . . oh, not as a duty, not as a chronic career, only as a rare and special rite in symbol of . . . but what have they made of it, the preachers of woman's duty? . . . The castrated performance of a sickening drudgery was held to be a woman's proper virtue-while that which gave it meaning and sanction was held as a shameful sin . . . the work of dealing with grease, steam and slimy peelings in a reeking kitchen was held to be a spiritual matter, an act of compliance with her moral duty-while the meeting of two bodies in a bedroom was held to be a physical indulgence, an act of surrender to an animal instinct, with no glory, meaning or pride of spirit to be claimed by the animals involved.  She leaped abruptly to her feet. She did not want to think of the outer world or of its moral code. But she knew that that was not the subject of her thoughts. And she did not want to think of the subject her mind was intent on pursuing, the subject to which it kept returning against her will, by some will of its own. . . .She paced the room, hating the ugly, jerky, uncontrolled looseness of her movements-torn between the need to let her motion break the stillness, and the knowledge that this was not the form of break she wanted. She lighted cigarettes, for an instant's illusion of purposeful action-and discarded them within another instant, feeling the weary distaste of a substitute purpose. She looked at the room like a restless beggar, pleading with physical objects to give her a motive, wishing she could find something to clean, to mend, to polish-while knowing that no task was worth the effort. When nothing seems worth the effort-said some stern voice in her mind-it's a screen to hide a wish that's worth too much; what do you want? . . . She snapped a match, viciously jerking the flame to the tip of a cigarette she noticed hanging, unlighted, in the corner of her mouth. . . . What do you want?-repeated the voice that sounded severe as a judge. I want him to come back!-she answered, throwing the words, as a soundless cry, at some accuser within her, almost as one would throw a bone to a pursuing beast, in the hope of distracting it from pouncing upon the rest.  I want him back-she said softly, in answer to the accusation that there was no reason for so great an impatience. . . . I want him back -she said pleadingly, in answer to the cold reminder that her answer did not balance the judge's scale. . . . I want him back!-she cried defiantly, fighting not to drop the one superfluous, protective word in that sentence. She felt her head drooping with exhaustion, as after a prolonged beating. The cigarette she saw between her fingers had burned the mere length of half an inch. She ground it out and fell into the armchair again.  I'm not evading it-she thought-I'm not evading it, it's just that I can see no way to any answer. . . . That which you want-said the voice, while she stumbled through a thickening fog-is yours for the taking, but anything less than your full acceptance, anything less than your full conviction, is a betrayal of everything he is. . . . Then let him damn me-she thought, as if the voice were now lost in the fog and would not hear her-let him damn me tomorrow. . . . I want him . . . back. . . . She heard no answer, because her head had fallen softly against the chair; she was asleep.  When she opened her eyes, she saw him standing three feet away, looking down at her, as if he had been watching her for some time. She saw his face and, with the clarity of undivided perception, she saw the meaning of the expression on his face: it was the meaning she had fought for hours. She saw it without astonishment, because she had not yet regained her awareness of any reason why it should astonish her.  "This is the way you look," he said softly, "when you fall asleep in your office," and she knew that he, too, was not fully aware of letting her hear it: the way he said it told her how often he had thought of it and for what reason. "You look as if you would awaken in a world where you had nothing to hide or to fear," and she knew that the first movement of her face had been a smile, she knew it in the moment when it vanished, when she grasped that they were both awake. He added quietly, with full awareness, "But here, it's true."  Her first emotion of the realm of reality was a sense of power. She sat up with a flowing, leisurely movement of confidence, feeling the flow of the motion from muscle to muscle through her body. She asked, and it was the slowness, the sound of casual curiosity, the tone of taking the implications for granted, that gave to her voice the faintest sound of disdain, "How did you know what I look like in . . . my office?"  "I told you that I've watched you for years."  "How were you able to watch me that thoroughly? From where?"  "I will not answer you now," he said, simply, without defiance.  The slight movement of her shoulder leaning back, the pause, then the lower, huskier tone of her voice, left a hint of smiling triumph to trail behind her words: "When did you see me for the first time?"  "Ten years ago," he answered, looking straight at her, letting her see that he was answering the full, unnamed meaning of her question.  "Where?" The word was almost a command.  He hesitated, then she saw a faint smile that touched only his lips, not his eyes, the kind of smile with which one contemplates-with longing, bitterness and pride-a possession purchased at an excruciating cost; his eyes seemed directed, not at her, but at the girl of that time.  "Underground, in the Taggart Terminal," he answered.  She became suddenly conscious of her posture: she had let her shoulder blades slide down against the chair, carelessly, half-lying, one leg stretched forward-and with her sternly tailored, transparent blouse, her wide peasant skirt hand-printed in violent colors, her thin stocking and high-heeled pump, she did not look like a railroad executive-the consciousness of it struck her in answer to his eyes that seemed to be seeing the unattainable-she looked like that which she was: his servant girl. She knew the moment when some faintest stress of the brilliance in his dark green eyes removed the veil of distance, replacing the vision of the past by the act of seeing her immediate person.  She met his eyes with that insolent glance which is a smile without movement of facial muscles.  He turned away, but as he moved across the room his steps were as eloquent as the sound of a voice. She knew that he wanted to leave the room, as he always left it, he had never stayed for longer than a brief good night when he came home. She watched the course of his struggle, whether by means of his steps, begun in one direction and swerving in another, or by means of her certainty that her body had become an instrument for the direct perception of his, like a screen reflecting both movements and motives-she could not tell. She knew only that he who had never started or lost a battle against himself, now had no power to leave this room.  His manner seemed to show no sign of strain. He took off his coat, throwing it aside, remaining in shirt sleeves, and sat down, facing her, at the window across the room. But he sat down on the arm of a chair, as if he were neither leaving nor staying.  She felt the light-headed, the easy, the almost frivolous sensation of triumph in the knowledge that she was holding him as surely as by a physical touch; for the length of a moment, brief and dangerous to endure, it was a more satisfying form of contact.  Then she felt a sudden, blinding shock, which was half-blow, half scream within her, and she groped, stunned, for its cause-only to realize that he had leaned a little to one side and it had been no more than the sight of an accidental posture, of the long line running from his shoulder to the angle of his waist, to his hips, down his legs. She looked away, not to let him see that she was trembling-and she dropped all thoughts of triumph and of whose was the power.  "I've seen you many times since," he said, quietly, steadily, but a little more slowly than usual, as if he could control everything except his need to speak.  "Where have you seen me?"  "Many places."  "But you made certain to remain unseen?" She knew that his was a face she could not have failed to notice.  "Yes."  "Why? Were you afraid?"  "Yes."  He said it simply, and it took her a moment to realize that he was admitting he knew what the sight of his person would have meant to her. "Did you know who I was, when you saw me for the first time?"  "Oh yes. My worst enemy but one."  "What?" She had not expected it; she added, more quietly, "Who's the worst one?"  "Dr. Robert Stadler."  "Did you have me classified with him?"  "No. He's my conscious enemy. He's the man who sold his soul. We don't intend to reclaim him. You-you were one of us. I knew it, long before I saw you. I knew also that you would be the last to join us and the hardest one to defeat."  "Who told you that?"  "Francisco."  She let a moment pass, then asked, "What did he say?"  "He said that of all the names on our list, you'd be the one most difficult to win. That was when I heard of you for the first time. It was Francisco who put your name on our list. He told me that you were the sole hope and future of Taggart Transcontinental, that you'd stand against us for a long time, that you'd fight a desperate battle for your railroad-because you had too much endurance, courage and consecration to your work." He glanced at her. "He told me nothing else. He spoke of you as if he were merely discussing one of our future strikers. I knew that you and he had been childhood friends, that was all."  "When did you see me?"  "Two years later."  "How?"  "By chance. It was late at night . . . on a passenger platform of the Taggart Terminal." She knew that this was a form of surrender, he did not want to say it, yet he had to speak, she heard both the muted intensity and the pull of resistance in his voice-he had to speak, because he had to give himself and her this one form of contact. "You wore an evening gown. You had a cape half-slipping off your body-I saw, at first, only your bare shoulders, your back and your profile-it looked for a moment as if the cape would slip further and you would stand there naked. Then I saw that you wore a long gown, the color of ice, like the tunic of a Grecian goddess, but had the short hair and the imperious profile of an American woman. You looked preposterously out of place on a railroad platform-and it was not on a railroad platform that I was seeing you, I was seeing a setting that had never haunted me before-but then, suddenly, I knew that you did belong among the rails, the soot and the girders, that that was the proper setting for a flowing gown and naked shoulders and a face as alive as yours-a railroad platform, not a curtained apartment-you looked like a symbol of luxury and you belonged in the place that was its source-you seemed to bring wealth, grace, extravagance and the enjoyment of life back to their rightful owners, to the men who created railroads and factories-you had a look of energy and of its reward, together, a look of competence and luxury combined-and I was the first man who had ever stated in what manner these two were inseparable-and I thought that if our age gave form to its proper gods and erected a statue to the meaning of an American railroad, yours would be that statue. . . . Then I saw what you were doing-and I knew who you were. You were giving orders to three Terminal officials, I could not hear your words, but your voice sounded swift, clear-cut and confident. I knew that you were Dagny Taggart. I came closer, close enough to hear two sentences. 'Who said so?' asked one of the men. 'I did,' you answered. That was all I heard. That was enough."  "And then?"  He raised his eyes slowly to hold hers across the room, and the submerged intensity that pulled his voice down, blurring its tone to softness, gave it a sound of self-mockery that was desperate and almost gentle: "Then I knew that abandoning my motor was not the hardest price I would have to pay for this strike."  She wondered which anonymous shadow-among the passengers who had hurried past her, as insubstantial as the steam of the engines and as ignored-which shadow and face had been his; she wondered how close she had come to him for the length of that unknown moment. "Oh, why didn't you speak to me, then or later?"  "Do you happen to remember what you were doing in the Terminal that night?"  "I remember vaguely a night when they called me from some party I was attending. My father was out of town and the new Terminal manager had made some sort of error that tied up all traffic in the tunnels. The old manager had quit unexpectedly the week before."  "It was I who made him quit."  "I see . . ."  Her voice trailed off, as if abandoning sound, as her eyelids dropped, abandoning sight. If he had not withstood it then-she thought-if he had come to claim her, then or later, what sort of tragedy would they have had to reach? . . . She remembered what she had felt when she had cried that she would shoot the destroyer on sight. . . .I would have-the thought was not in words, she knew it only as a trembling pressure in her stomach-I would have shot him, afterward, if I discovered his role . . . and I would have had to discover it . . .and yet-she shuddered, because she knew she still wished he had come to her, because the thought not to be admitted into her mind, but flowing as a dark warmth through her body, was: I would have shot him, but not before.  She raised her eyelids-and she knew that that thought was as naked to him in her eyes, as it was to her in his. She saw his veiled glance and the tautness of his mouth, she saw him reduced to agony, she felt herself drowned by the exultant wish to cause him pain, to see it, to watch it, to watch it beyond her own endurance and his, then to reduce him to the helplessness of pleasure.  He got up, he looked away, and she could not tell whether it was the slight lift of his head or the tension of his features that made his face look oddly calm and clear, as if it were stripped of emotion down to the naked purity of its structure.  "Every man that your railroad needed and lost in the past ten years," he said, "it was I who made you lose him." His voice had the single toned flatness and the luminous simplicity of an accountant who reminds a reckless purchaser that cost is an absolute which cannot be escaped, "I have pulled every girder from under Taggart Transcontinental and, if you choose to go back, I will see it collapse upon your head."  He turned to leave the room. She stopped him. It was her voice, more than her words, that made him stop: her voice was low, it had no quality of emotion, only of a sinking weight, and its sole color was some dragging undertone, like an inner echo, resembling a threat; it was the voice of the plea of a person who still retains a concept of honor, but is long past caring for it: "You want to hold me here, don't you?"  "More than anything else in the world."  "You could hold me."  "I know it."  His voice had said it with the same sound as hers. He waited, to regain his breath. When he spoke, his voice was low and clear, with some stressed quality of awareness, which was almost the quality of a smile of understanding: "It's your acceptance of this place that I want. What good would it do me, to have your physical presence without any meaning? That's the kind of faked reality by which most people cheat themselves of their lives. I'm not capable of it." He turned to go. "And neither are you. Good night, Miss Taggart."  He walked out, into his bedroom, closing the door.  She was past the realm of thought-as she lay in bed in the darkness of her room, unable to think or to sleep-and the moaning violence that filled her mind seemed only a sensation of her muscles, but its tone and its twisting shades were like a pleading cry, which she knew, not as words, but as pain: Let him come here, let him break -let it be damned, all of it, my railroad and his strike and everything we've lived by!-let it be damned, everything we've been and are!-he would, if tomorrow I were to die-then let me die, but tomorrow -let him come here, be it any price he names, I have nothing left that's not for sale to him any longer-is this what it means to be an animal?-it does and I am. . . . She lay on her back, her palms pressed to the sheet at her sides, to stop herself from rising and walking into his room, knowing that she was capable even of that. . . .It's not I, it's a body I can neither endure nor control. . . . But somewhere within her, not as words, but as a radiant point of stillness, there was the presence of the judge who seemed to observe her, not in stern condemnation any longer, but in approval and amusement, as if saying: Your body?-if he were not what you know him to be, would your body bring you to this?-why is it his body that you want, and no other?-do you think that you are damning them, the things you both have lived by?-are you damning that which you are honoring in this very moment, by your very desire? . . . She did not have to hear the words, she knew them, she had always known them. . . . After a while, she lost the glow of that knowledge, and there was nothing left but pain and the palms that were pressed to the sheet-and the almost indifferent wonder whether he, too, was awake and fighting the same torture.  She heard no sound in the house and saw no light from his window on the tree trunks outside. After a long while she heard, from the darkness of his room, two sounds that gave her a full answer; she knew that he was awake and that he would not come; it was the sound of a step and the click of a cigarette lighter.  Richard Halley stopped playing, turned away from the piano and glanced at Dagny, He saw her drop her face with the involuntary movement of hiding too strong an emotion, he rose, smiled and said softly, "Thank you."  "Oh no . . ." she whispered, knowing that the gratitude was hers and that it was futile to express it. She was thinking of the years when the works he had just played for her were being written, here, in his small cottage on a ledge of the valley, when all this prodigal magnificence of sound was being shaped by him as a flowing monument to a concept which equates the sense of life with the sense of beauty-while she had walked through the streets of New York in a hopeless quest for some form of enjoyment, with the screeches of a modern symphony running after her, as if spit by the infected throat of a loud-speaker coughing its malicious hatred of existence.  "But I mean it," said Richard Halley, smiling. "I'm a businessman and I never do anything without payment. You've paid me. Do you see why I wanted to play for you tonight?"  She raised her head. He stood in the middle of his living room, they were alone, with the window open to the summer night, to the dark trees on a long sweep of ledges descending toward the glitter of the valley's distant lights.  "Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as much as it does to you?"  "Not many," she answered simply, neither as boast nor flattery, but as an impersonal tribute to the exacting values involved.  "That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don't mean your enjoyment, I don't mean your emotion-emotions be damned!-I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it-I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired." He chuckled.  "There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive. But it's a fear I've never shared. I do not fool myself about my work or the response I seek-I value both too highly. I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively-or blindly, I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show-or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart-only by someone's head. And when I find a customer with that invaluable capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual profit. An artist is a trader, Miss Taggart, the hardest and most exacting of all traders. Now do you understand me?"  "Yes," she said incredulously, "I do," incredulously because she was hearing her own symbol of moral pride, chosen by a man she had least expected to choose it.  "If you do, why did you look quite so tragic just a moment ago? What is it that you regret?"  "The years when your work has remained unheard."  "But it hasn't. I've given two or three concerts every year. Here, in Galt's Gulch. I am giving one next week. I hope you'll come. The price of admission is twenty-five cents."  She could not help laughing. He smiled, then his face slipped slowly into earnestness, as under the tide of some unspoken contemplation of his own. He looked at the darkness beyond the window, at a spot where, in a clearing of the branches, with the moonlight draining its color, leaving only its metallic luster, the sign of the dollar hung like a curve of shining steel engraved on the sky.  "Miss Taggart, do you see why I'd give three dozen modern artists for one real businessman? Why I have much more in common with Ellis Wyatt or Ken Danagger-who happens to be tone deaf-than with men like Mort Liddy and Balph Eubank? Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes-which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification --which means: the capacity to sew, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before. That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels-what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discover how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor? That sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and poets-what do they suppose moves an industrialist to defy the whole world for the sake of his new metal, as the inventors of the airplane, the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs or new continents have done through all the ages? . . . An intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth, Miss Taggart? Have you heard the moralists and the art lovers of the centuries talk about the artist's intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth? Name me a greater example of such devotion than the act of a man who says that the earth does turn, or the act of a man who says that an alloy of steel and copper has certain properties which enable it to do certain things, that it is and does-and let the world rack him or ruin him, he will not bear false witness to the evidence of his mind! This, Miss Taggart, this sort of spirit, courage and love for truth-as against a sloppy bum who goes around proudly assuring you that he has almost reached the perfection of a lunatic, because he's an artist who hasn't the faintest idea what his art work is or means, he's not restrained by such crude concepts as 'being' or 'meaning' he's the vehicle of higher mysteries, he doesn't know how he created his work or why, it just came out of him spontaneously, like vomit out of a drunkard, he did not think, he wouldn't stoop to thinking, he just felt it, all he has to do is feel-he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard! I, who know what discipline, what effort, what tension of mind, what unrelenting strain upon one's power of clarity are needed to produce a work of art-I, who know that it requires a labor which makes a chain gang look like rest and a severity no army drilling sadist could impose-I'll take the operator of a coal mine over any walking vehicle of higher mysteries. The operator knows that it's not his feelings that keep the coal carts moving under the earth-and he knows what does keep them moving. Feelings? Oh yes, we do feel, he, you and I-we are, in fact, the only people capable of feeling-and we know where our feelings come from. But what we did not know and have delayed learning for too long is the nature of those who claim that they cannot account for their feelings. We d............