Atlas Shrugged

The ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel had been decorated under Mrs. Taggart's direction; she had an artist's taste, and the setting of that evening was her masterpiece. "Dagny, there are things I would like you to learn to notice," she said, "lights, colors, flowers, music.

They are not as negligible as you might think." "I've never thought they're negligible," Dagny answered happily. For once, Mrs. Taggart felt a bond between them; Dagny was looking at her with a child's grateful trust. "They're the things that make life beautiful," said Mrs.

Taggart. "I want this evening to be very beautiful for you, Dagny. The first ball is the most romantic event of one's life."

To Mrs. Taggart, the greatest surprise was the moment when she saw Dagny standing under the lights, looking at the ballroom. This was not a child, not a girl, but a woman of such confident, dangerous power that Mrs. Taggart stared at her with shocked admiration. In an age of casual, cynical, indifferent routine, among people who held themselves as if they were not flesh, but meat—Dagny's bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one's half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure. And this—thought Mrs. Taggart, smiling—was the girl she had believed to be devoid of sexual capacity. She felt an immense relief, and a touch of amusement at the thought that a discovery of this kind should make her feel relieved.

The relief lasted only for a few hours. At the end of the evening, she saw Dagny in a corner of the ballroom, sitting on a balustrade as if it were a fence rail, her legs dangling under the chiffon skirt as if she were dressed in slacks. She was talking to a couple of helpless young men, her face contemptuously empty.

Neither Dagny nor Mrs. Taggart said a word when they rode home together. But hours later, on a sudden impulse, Mrs. Taggart went to her daughter's room. Dagny stood by the window, still wearing the white evening gown; it looked like a cloud supporting a body that now seemed too thin for it, a small body with sagging shoulders. Beyond the window, the clouds were gray in the first light of morning.

When Dagny turned, Mrs. Taggart saw only puzzled helplessness in her face; the face was calm, but something about it made Mrs. Taggart wish she had not wished that her daughter should discover sadness.

"Mother, do they think it's exactly in reverse?" she asked.

"What?" asked Mrs. Taggart, bewildered.

"The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?"

"Darling, what do you mean?"

"There wasn't a person there who enjoyed it," she said, her voice lifeless, "or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant."

"Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay."

"How? By being stupid?"

"I mean, for instance, didn't you enjoy meeting the young men?"

"What men? There wasn't a man there I couldn't squash ten of."

Days later, sitting at her desk at Rockdale Station, feeling lightheartedly at home, Dagny thought of the party and shrugged in contemptuous reproach at her own disappointment. She looked up: it was spring and there were leaves on the tree branches in the darkness outside; the air was still and warm. She asked herself what she had expected from that party. She did not know. But she felt it again, here, now, as she sat slouched over a battered desk, looking out into the darkness: a sense of expectation without object, rising through her body, slowly, like a warm liquid. She slumped forward across the desk, lazily, feeling neither exhaustion nor desire to work.

When Francisco came, that summer, she told him about the party and about her disappointment. He listened silently, looking at her for the first time with that glance of unmoving mockery which he reserved for others, a glance that seemed to see too much. She felt as if he heard, in her words, more than she knew she told him.

She saw the same glance in his eyes on the evening when she left him too early. They were alone, sitting on the shore of the river.