Atlas Shrugged

"All of you welfare preachers—it's not unearned money that you're after. You want handouts, but of a different kind. I'm a gold-digger of the spirit, you said, because I look for value. Then you, the welfare preachers . . . it's the spirit that you want to loot. I never thought and nobody ever told us how it could be thought of and what it would mean—the unearned in spirit. But that is what you want. You want unearned love. You want unearned admiration. You want unearned greatness. You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything.

Without . . . the necessity . . . of being."

"Shut up!" he screamed.

They looked at each other, both in terror, both feeling as if they were swaying on an edge which she could not and he would not name, both knowing that one more step would be fatal.

"What do you think you're saying?" he asked in a tone of petty anger, which sounded almost benevolent by bringing them back into the realm of the normal, into the near-wholesomeness of nothing worse than a family quarrel. "What sort of metaphysical subject are you trying to deal with?"

"I don't know . . ." she said wearily, dropping her head, as if some shape she had tried to capture had slipped once more out of her grasp. "I don't know . . . It doesn't seem possible . . ."

"You'd better not try to wade in way over your head or—" But he had to stop, because the butler entered, bringing the glittering ice bucket with the champagne ordered for celebration.

They remained silent, letting the room be filled by the sounds which centuries of men and of struggle had established as the symbol of joyous attainment: the blast of the cork, the laughing tinkle of a pale gold liquid running into two broad cups filled with the weaving reflections of candles, the whisper of bubbles rising through two crystal stems, almost demanding that everything in sight rise, too, in the same aspiration.

They remained silent, till the butler had gone. Taggart sat looking down at the bubbles, holding the stem of his glass between two limply casual fingers. Then his hand closed suddenly about the stem into an awkwardly convulsed fist and he raised it, not as one lifts a glass of champagne, but as one would lift a butcher knife.

"To Francisco d'Anconia!" he said.

She put her glass down. "No," she answered.

"Drink it!" he screamed.

"No," she answered, her voice like a drop of lead.

They held each other's glances for a moment, the light playing on the golden liquid, not reaching their faces or eyes.

"Oh, go to hell!" he cried, leaping to his feet, flinging his glass to smash on the floor and rushing out of the room.

She sat at the table, not moving, for a long time, then rose slowly and pressed the bell.

She walked to her room, her steps unnaturally even, she opened the door of a closet, she reached for a suit and a pair of shoes, she took off the housecoat, moving with cautious precision, as if her life depended on not jarring anything about or within her. She held onto a single thought: that she had to get out of this house—just get out of it for a while, if only for the next hour—and then, later, she would be able to face all that had to be faced.

The lines were blurring on the paper before her and, raising her head, Dagny realized that it had long since grown dark.

She pushed the papers aside, unwilling to turn on the lamp, permitting herself the luxury of idleness and darkness. It cut her off from the city beyond the windows of her living room. The calendar in the distance said: August 5.

The month behind her had gone, leaving nothing but the blank of dead time. It had gone into the planless, thankless work of racing from emergency to emergency, of delaying the collapse of a railroad—a month like a waste pile of disconnected days, each given to averting the disaster of the moment. It had not been a sum of achievements brought into existence, but only a sum of zeros, of that which had not happened, a sum of prevented catastrophes—not a task in the service of life, but only a race against death.

There had been times when an unsummoned vision—a sight of the valley—had seemed to rise before her, not as a sudden appearance, but as a constant, hidden presence that suddenly chose to assume an insistent reality. She had faced it, through moments of blinded stillness, in a contest between an unmoving decision and an unyielding pain, a pain to be fought by acknowledgment, by saying: All right, even this.