Atlas Shrugged

She chuckled, He rose as if she had slapped him. He went to the bar and poured himself another drink, not offering to refill her glass.

She was speaking into space, staring past him. "He did notice my existence—even though I can't lay railroad tracks for him and erect bridges to the glory of his Metal. I can't build his mills—but I can destroy them. I can't produce his Metal—but I can take it away from him. I can't bring men down to their knees in admiration—but I can bring them down to their knees."

"Shut up!" he screamed in terror, as if she were coming too close to that fogbound alley which had to remain unseen.

She glanced up at his face. "You're such a coward, Jim."

"Why don't you get drunk?" he snapped, sticking his unfinished drink at her mouth, as if he wanted to strike her.

Her fingers half-closed limply about the glass, and she drank, spilling the liquor down her chin, her breast and her gown.

"Oh hell, Lillian, you're a mess!" he said and, not troubling to reach for his handkerchief, he stretched out his hand to wipe the liquor with the flat of his palm. His fingers slipped under the gown's neckline, closing over her breast, his breath catching in a sudden gulp, like a hiccough. His eyelids were drawing closed, but he caught a glimpse of her face leaning back unresistingly, her mouth swollen with revulsion.

When he reached for her mouth, her arms embraced him obediently and her mouth responded, but the response was just a pressure, not a kiss.

He raised his head to glance at her face. Her teeth were bared in a smile, but she was staring past him, as if mocking some invisible presence, her smile lifeless, yet loud with malice, like the grin of a fleshless skull.

He jerked her closer, to stifle the sight and his own shudder. His hands were going through the automatic motions of intimacy—and she complied, but in a manner that made him feel as if the beats of her arteries under his touch were snickering giggles. They were both performing an expected routine, a routine invented by someone and imposed upon them, performing it in mockery, in hatred, in defiling parody on its inventors.

He felt a sightless, heedless fury, part-horror, part-pleasure—the horror of committing an act he would never dare confess to anyone—the pleasure of committing it in blasphemous defiance of those to whom he would not dare confess it. He was himself!—the only conscious part of his rage seemed to be screaming to him—he was, at last, himself!

They did not speak. They knew each other's motive. Only two words were pronounced between them. "Mrs. Rearden," he said.

They did not look at each other when he pushed her into his bedroom and onto his bed, falling against her body, as against a soft. stuffed object. Their faces had a look of secrecy, the look of partners in guilt, the furtive, smutty look of children defiling someone's clean fence by chalking sneaky scratches intended as symbols of obscenity.

Afterward, it did not disappoint him that what he had possessed was an inanimate body without resistance or response. It was not a woman that he had wanted to possess. It was not an act in celebration of life that he had wanted to perform—but an act in celebration of the triumph of impotence.

Cherryl unlocked the door and slipped in quietly, almost surreptitiously, as if hoping not to be seen or to see the place which was her home. The sense of Dagny's presence—of Dagny's world—had supported her on her way back, but when she entered her own apartment the walls seemed to swallow her again into the suffocation of a trap.

The apartment was silent; a wedge of light cut across the anteroom from a door left half-open. She dragged herself mechanically in the direction of her room. Then she stopped.

The open band of light was the door of Jim's study, and on the illuminated strip of its carpet she saw a woman's hat with a feather stirring faintly in a draft.

She took a step forward. The room was empty, she saw two glasses, one on a table, the other on the floor, and a woman's purse lying on the seat of an armchair. She stood, in unexacting stupor, until she heard the muffled drawl of two voices behind the door of Jim's bedroom; she could not distinguish the words, only the quality of the sounds: Jim's voice had a tone of irritation, the woman's—of contempt.

Then she found herself in her own room, fumbling frantically to lock her door. She had been flung here by the blind panic of escape, as if it were she who had to hide, she who had to run from the ugliness of being seen in the act of seeing them—a panic made of revulsion, of pity, of embarrassment, of that mental chastity which recoils from confronting a man with the unanswerable proof of his evil.

She stood in the middle of her room, unable to grasp what action was now possible to her. Then her knees gave way, folding gently, she found herself sitting on the floor and she stayed there, staring at the carpet, shaking.