The roast turkey had cost $30. The champagne had cost $25. The lace tablecloth, a cobweb of grapes and vine leaves iridescent in the candlelight, had cost $2,000. The dinner service, with an artist's design burned in blue and gold into a translucent white china, had cost $2,500.  The silverware, which bore the initials LR in Empire wreaths of laurels, had cost $3,000. But it was held to be unspiritual to think of money and of what that money represented.  A peasant's wooden shoe, gilded, stood in the center of the table, filled with marigolds, grapes and carrots. The candles were stuck into pumpkins that were cut as open-mouthed faces drooling raisins, nuts and candy upon the tablecloth.  It was Thanksgiving dinner, and the three who faced Rearden about the table were his wife, his mother and his brother.  "This is the night to thank the Lord for our blessings," said Rearden's mother. "God has been kind to us. There are people all over the country who haven't got any food in the house tonight, and some that haven't even got a house, and more of them going jobless every day. Gives me the creeps to look around in the city. Why, only last week, who do you suppose I ran into but Lucie Judson-Henry, do you remember Lucie Judson? Used to live next door to us. up in Minnesota, when you were ten-twelve years old. Had a boy about your age. I lost track of Lucie when they moved to New York, must have been all of twenty years ago. Well, it gave me the creeps to see what she's come to-just a toothless old hag, wrapped in a man's overcoat, panhandling on a street corner. And I thought: That could've been me, but for the grace of God."  "Well, if thanks are in order," said Lillian gaily, "I think that we shouldn't forget Gertrude, the new cook. She's an artist."  "Me, I'm just going to be old-fashioned," said Philip. "I'm just going to thank the sweetest mother in the world."  "Well, for the matter of that," said Rearden's mother, "we ought to thank Lillian for this dinner and for all the trouble she took to make it so pretty. She spent hours fixing the table. It's real quaint and different."  "It's the wooden shoe that does it," said Philip, bending his head sidewise to study it in a manner of critical appreciation. "That's the real touch. Anybody can have candles, silverware and junk, that doesn't take anything but money-but this shoe, that took thought."  Rearden said nothing. The candlelight moved over his motionless face as over a portrait; the portrait bore an expression of impersonal courtesy.  "You haven't touched your wine," said his mother, looking at him.  "What I think is you ought to drink a toast in gratitude to the people of this country who have given you so much."  "Henry is not in the mood for it, Mother," said Lillian. "I'm afraid Thanksgiving is a holiday only for those who have a clear conscience."  She raised her wine glass, but stopped it halfway to her lips and asked, "You're not going to make some sort of stand at your trial tomorrow, are you, Henry?"  "I am."  She put the glass down. "What are you going to do?"  "You'll see it tomorrow."  "You don't really imagine that you can get away with it!"  "I don't know what you have in mind as the object I'm to get away with."  "Do you realize that the charge against you is extremely serious?"  "I do."  "You've admitted that you sold the Metal to Ken Danagger."  "I have."  "They might send you to jail for ten years."  "I don't think they will, but it's possible."  "Have you been reading the newspapers, Henry?" asked Philip, with an odd kind of smile.  "No."  "Oh, you should!"  "Should I? Why?"  "You ought to see the names they call you!"  "That's interesting," said Rearden; he said it about the fact that Philip's smile was one of pleasure.  "I don't understand it," said his mother. "Jail? Did you say jail, Lillian? Henry, are you going to be sent to jail?"  "I might be."  "But that's ridiculous! Do something about it."  "What?"  "I don't know. I don't understand any of it. Respectable people don't go to jail. Do something. You've always known what to do about business."  "Not this kind of business."  "I don't believe it." Her voice had the tone of a frightened, spoiled child. "You're saying it just to be mean."  "He's playing the hero, Mother," said Lillian. She smiled coldly, turning to Rearden. "Don't you think that your attitude is perfectly futile?"  "No."  "You know that cases of this kind are not . . . intended ever to come to trial. There are ways to avoid it, to get things settled amicably -if one knows the right people."  "I don't know the right people."  "Look at Orren Boyle. He's done much more and much worse than your little fling at the black market, but he's smart enough to keep himself out of courtrooms."  "Then I'm not smart enough."  "Don't you think it's time you made an effort to adjust yourself to the conditions of our age?"  "No."  "Well, then I don't see how you can pretend that you're some sort of victim. If you go to jail, it will be your own fault."  "What pretense are you talking about, Lillian?"  "Oh, I know that you think you're fighting for some sort of principle -but actually it's only a matter of your incredible conceit. You're doing it for no better reason than because you think you're right."  "Do you think they're right?"  She shrugged, "That's the conceit I'm talking about-the idea that it matters who's right or wrong. It's the most insufferable form of vanity, this insistence on always doing right. How do you know what's right? How can anyone ever know it? It's nothing but a delusion to flatter your own ego and to hurt other people by flaunting your superiority over them."  He was looking at her with attentive interest. "Why should it hurt other people, if it's nothing but a delusion?"  "Is it necessary for me to point out that in your case it's nothing but hypocrisy? That is why I find your attitude preposterous. Questions of right have no bearing on human existence. And you're certainly nothing but human-aren't you, Henry? You're no better than any of the men you're going to face tomorrow. I think you should remember that it's not for you to make a stand on any sort of principle. Maybe you're a victim in this particular mess, maybe they're pulling a rotten trick on you, but what of it? They're doing it because they're weak; they couldn't resist the temptation to grab your Metal and to muscle in on your profits, because they had no other way of ever getting rich. Why should you blame them? It's only a question of different strains, but it s the same shoddy human fabric that gives way just as quickly. You wouldn't be tempted by money, because it's so easy for you to make it. But you wouldn't withstand other pressures and you'd fall just as ignominiously. Wouldn't you? So you have no right to any righteous indignation against them. You have no moral superiority to assert or to defend. And if you haven't, then what is the point of fighting a battle that you can't win? I suppose that one might find some satisfaction in being a martyr, if one is above reproach. But you-who are you to cast the first stone?"  She paused to observe the effect. There was none, except that his look of attentive interest seemed intensified; he listened as if he were held by some impersonal, scientific curiosity. It was not the response she had expected.  "1 believe you understand me," she said.  "No," he answered quietly, "I don't."  "I think you should abandon the illusion of your own perfection, which you know full well to be an illusion. I think you should learn to get along with other people. The day of the hero is past. This is the day of humanity, in a much deeper sense than you imagine. Human beings are no longer expected to be saints nor to be punished for their sins. Nobody is right or wrong, we're all in it together, we're all human-and the human is the imperfect. You'll gain nothing tomorrow by proving that they're wrong. You ought to give in with good grace, simply because it's the practical thing to do. You ought to keep silent, precisely because they're wrong. They'll appreciate it. Make concessions for others and they'll make concessions for you. Live and let live. Give and take. Give in and take in. That's the policy of our age-and it's time you accepted it. Don't tell me you're too good for it. You know that you're not. You know that I know it."  The look of his eyes, held raptly still upon some point in space, was not in answer to her words; it was in answer to a man's voice saying to him, "Do you think that what you're facing is merely a conspiracy to seize your wealth? You, who know the source of wealth, should know it's much more and much worse than that."  He turned to look at Lillian. He was seeing the full extent of her failure-in the immensity of his own indifference. The droning stream of her insults was like the sound of a distant riveting machine, a long, impotent pressure that reached nothing within him. He had heard her studied reminders of his guilt on every evening he had spent at home in the past three months. But guilt had been the one emotion he had found himself unable to feel. The punishment she had wanted to inflict on him was the torture of shame; what she had inflicted was the torture of boredom.  He remembered his brief glimpse-on that morning in the Wayne Falkland Hotel-of a flaw in her scheme of punishment, which he had not examined. Now he stated it to himself for the first time. She wanted to force upon him the suffering of dishonor-but his own sense of honor was her only weapon of enforcement. She wanted to wrest from him an acknowledgment of his moral depravity-but only his own moral rectitude could attach significance to such a verdict. She wanted to injure him by her contempt-but he could not be injured, unless he respected her judgment. She wanted to punish him for the pain he had caused her and she held her pain as a gun aimed at him, as if she wished to extort his agony at the point of his pity. But her only tool was his own benevolence, his concern for her, his compassion. Her only power was the power of his own virtues. What if he chose to withdraw it?  An issue of guilt, he thought, had to rest on his own acceptance of the code of justice that pronounced him guilty. He did not accept it; he never had. His virtues, all the virtues she needed to achieve his punishment, came from another code and lived by another standard.  He felt no guilt, no shame, no regret, no dishonor. He felt no concern for any verdict she chose to pass upon him: he had lost respect for her judgment long ago. And the sole chain still holding him was only a last remnant of pity.  But what was the code on which she acted? What sort of code permitted the concept of a punishment that required the victim's own virtue as the fuel to make it work? A code-he thought-which would destroy only those who tried to observe it; a punishment, from which only the honest would suffer, while the dishonest would escape unhurt. Could one conceive of an infamy lower than to equate virtue with pain, to make virtue, not vice, the source and motive power of suffering? If he were the kind of rotter she was struggling to make him believe he was, then no issue of his honor and his moral worth would matter to him. If he wasn't, then what was the nature of her attempt?  To count upon his virtue and use it as an instrument of torture, to practice blackmail with the victim's generosity as sole means of extortion, to accept the gift of a man's good will and turn it into a tool for the giver's destruction . . . he sat very still, contemplating the formula of so monstrous an evil that he was able to name it, but not to believe it possible.  He sat very still, held by the hammering of a single question: Did Lillian know the exact nature of her scheme?-was it a conscious policy, devised with full awareness of its meaning? He shuddered; he did not hate her enough to believe it.  He looked at her. She was absorbed, at the moment, in the task of cutting a plum pudding that stood as a mount of blue flame on a silver platter before her, its glow dancing over her face and her laughing mouth-she was plunging a silver knife into the flame, with a practiced, graceful curve of her arm. She had metallic leaves in the red, gold and brown colors of autumn scattered over one shoulder of her black velvet gown; they glittered in the candlelight.  He could not get rid of the impression, which he had kept receiving and rejecting for three months, that her vengeance was not a form of despair, as he had supposed-the impression, which he regarded as inconceivable, that she was enjoying it. He could find no trace of pain in her manner. She had an air of confidence new to her. She seemed to be at home in her house for the first time. Even though everything within the house was of her own choice and taste, she had always seemed to act as the bright, efficient, resentful manager of a high-class hotel, who keeps smiling in bitter amusement at her position of inferiority to the owners. The amusement remained, but the bitterness was gone. She had not gained weight, but her features had lost their delicate sharpness in a blurring, softening look of satisfaction; even her voice sounded as if it had grown plump.  He did not hear what she was saying; she was laughing in the last flicker of the blue flames, while he sat weighing the question: Did she know? He felt certain that he had discovered a secret much greater than the problem of his marriage, that he had grasped the formula of a policy practiced more widely throughout the world than he dared to contemplate at the moment. But to convict a human being of that practice was a verdict of irrevocable damnation, and he knew that he would not believe it of anyone, so long as the possibility of a doubt remained.  No-he thought, looking at Lillian, with the last effort of his generosity-he would not believe it of her. In the name of whatever grace and pride she possessed-in the name of such moments when he had seen a smile of joy on her face, the smile of a living being-in the name of the brief shadow of love he had once felt for her-he would not pronounce upon her a verdict of total evil.  The butler slipped a plate of plum pudding in front of him, and he heard Lillian's voice: "Where have you been for the last five minutes, Henry-or is it for the last century? You haven't answered me. You haven't heard a word I said."  "I heard it," he answered quietly. "I don't know what you're trying to accomplish."  "What a question!" said his mother. "Isn't that just like a man?  She's trying to save you from going to jail-that's what she's trying to accomplish."  That could be true, he thought; perhaps, by the reasoning of some crude, childish cowardice, the motive of their malice was a desire to protect him, to break him down into the safety of a compromise. It's possible, he thought-but knew that he did not believe it.  "You've always been unpopular," said Lillian, "and it's more than a matter of any one particular issue. It's that unyielding, intractable attitude of yours. The men who're going to try you, know what you're thinking. That's why they'll crack down on you, while they'd let another man off."  "Why, no. I don't think they know what I'm thinking. That's what I have to let them know tomorrow."  "Unless you show them that you're willing to give in and co-operate, you won't have a chance. You've been too hard to deal with."  "No. I've been too easy."  "But if they put you in jail," said his mother, "what's going to happen to your family? Have you thought of that?"  "No. I haven't."  "Have you thought of the disgrace you'll bring upon us?"  "Mother, do you understand the issue in this case?"  "No, I don't and I-don't want to understand. It's all dirty business and dirty politics. All business is just dirty politics and all politics is just dirty business. I never did want to understand any of it. I don't care who's right or wrong, but what I think a man ought to think of first is his family. Don't you know what this will do to us?"  "No, Mother, I don't know or care."  His mother looked at him, aghast.  "Well, I think you have a very provincial attitude, all of you," said Philip suddenly. "Nobody here seems to be concerned with the wider, social aspects of the case. I don't agree with you, Lillian. I don't see why you say that they're pulling some sort of rotten trick on Henry and that he's in the right. I think he's guilty as hell. Mother, I can explain the issue to you very simply. There's nothing unusual about it, the courts are full of cases of this kind. Businessmen are taking advantage of the national emergency in order to make money. They break the regulations which protect the common welfare of all-for the sake of their own personal gain. They're profiteers of the black market who grow rich by defrauding the poor of their rightful share, at a time of desperate shortage. They pursue a ruthless, grasping, grabbing, antisocial policy, based on nothing but plain, selfish greed. It's no use pretending about it, we all know it-and I think it's contemptible."  He spoke in a careless, offhand manner, as if explaining the obvious to a group of adolescents; his tone conveyed the assurance of a man who knows that the moral ground of his stand is not open to question.  Rearden sat looking at him, as if studying an object seen for the first time. Somewhere deep in Rearden's mind, as a steady, gentle, inexorable beat, was a man's voice, saying: By what right?-by what code?-by what standard?  "Philip," he said, not raising his voice, "say any of that again and you will find yourself out in the street, right now, with the suit you've got on your back, with whatever change you've got in your pocket and with nothing else."  He heard no answer, no sound, no movement. He noted that the stillness of the three before him had no element of astonishment. The look of shock on their faces was not the shock of people at the sudden explosion of a bomb, but the shock of people who had known that they were playing with a lighted fuse. There were no outcries, no protests, no questions; they knew that he meant it and they knew everything it meant. A dim, sickening feeling told him that they had known it long before he did.  "You . . . you wouldn't throw your own brother out on the street, would you?" his mother said at last; it was not a demand, but a plea.  "I would."  "But he's your brother . . . Doesn't that mean anything to you?"  "No."  "Maybe he goes a bit too far at times, but it's just loose talk, it's just that modern jabber, he doesn't know what he's saying."  "Then let him learn."  "Don't be hard on him . . . he's younger than you and . . . and weaker. He . . . Henry, don't look at me that way! I've never seen you look like that. . . . You shouldn't frighten him. You know that he needs you."  "Does he know it?"  "You can't be hard on a man who needs you, it will prey on your conscience for the rest of your life."  "It won't."  "You've got to be kind, Henry."  "I'm not."  "You've got to have some pity."  "I haven't."  "A good man knows how to forgive."  "I don't."  "You wouldn't want me to think that you're selfish."  "I am."  Philip's eyes were darting from one to the other. He looked like a man who had felt certain that he stood on solid granite and had suddenly discovered that it was thin ice, now cracking open all around him.  "But I . . . " he tried, and stopped; his voice sounded like steps testing the ice. "But don't I have any freedom of speech?"  "In your own house. Not in mine."  "Don't I have a right to my own ideas?"  "At your own expense. Not at mine."  "Don't you tolerate any differences of opinion?"  "Not when I'm paying the bills."  "Isn't there anything involved but money?"  "Yes. The fact that it's my money."  "Don't you want to consider any hi . . ."-he was going to say "higher," but changed his mind-"any other aspects?"  "No."  "But I'm not your slave."  "Am I yours?"  "I don't know what you-" He stopped; he knew what was meant.  "No," said Rearden, "you're not my slave. You're free to walk out of here any time you choose."  "I . . . I'm not speaking of that."  "I am."  "I don't understand it . . ."  "Don't you?"  "You've always known my my political views. You've never objected before."  "That's true," said Rearden gravely. "Perhaps I owe you an explanation, if I have misled you. I've tried never to remind you that you're riving on my charity. I thought that it was your place to remember it. I thought that any human being who accepts the help of another, knows that good will is the giver's only motive and that good will is the payment he owes in return. But I see that I was wrong. You were getting your food unearned and you concluded that affection did not have to be earned, either. You concluded that I was the safest person in the world for you to spit on, precisely because I held you by the throat. You concluded that I wouldn't want to remind you of it and that I would be tied by the fear of hurting your feelings. All right, let's get it straight: you're an object of charity who's exhausted his credit long ago. Whatever affection I might have felt for you once, is gone. I haven't the slightest interest in you, your fate or your future. I haven't any reason whatever for wishing to feed you. If you leave my house, it won't make any difference to me whether you starve or not. Now that is your position here and I will expect you to remember it, if you wish to stay. If not, then get out."  But for the movement of drawing his head a little into his shoulders, Philip showed no reaction. "Don't imagine that I enjoy living here," he said; his voice was lifeless and shrill. "If you think I'm happy, you're mistaken. I'd give anything to get away." The words pertained to defiance, but the voice had a curiously cautious quality. "If that is how you feel about it, it would be best for me to leave." The words were a statement, but the voice put a question mark at the end of it and waited; there was no answer. "You needn't worry about my future. I don't have to ask: favors of anybody. I can take care of myself all right." The words were addressed to Rearden, but the eyes were looking at his mother; she did not speak; she was afraid to move. "I've always wanted to be on my own. I've always wanted to live in New York, near all my friends." The voice slowed down and added in an impersonal, reflective manner, as if the words were not addressed to anyone, "Of course, I'd have the problem of maintaining a certain social position . . . it's not my fault if I'll be embarrassed by a family name associated with a millionaire. . . . I would need enough money for a year or two . . . to establish myself in a manner suitable to my-"  "You won't get it from me."  "I wasn't asking you for it, was 1? Don't imagine that I couldn't get it somewhere else, if I wanted to! Don't imagine that I couldn't leave! I'd go in a minute, if I had only myself to think about. But Mother needs me, and if I deserted her-"  "Don't explain."  "And besides, you misunderstood me, Henry. I haven't said anything to insult you. I wasn't speaking in any personal way. I was only discussing the general political picture from an abstract sociological viewpoint which-"  "Don't explain," said Rearden. He was looking at Philip's face. It was half-lowered, its eyes looking up at him. The eyes were lifeless, as if they had witnessed nothing; they held no spark of excitement, no personal sensation, neither of defiance nor of regret, neither of shame nor of suffering; they were filmy ovals that held no response to reality, no attempt to understand it, to weigh it, to reach some verdict of justice -ovals that held nothing but a dull, still, mindless hatred. "Don't explain. Just keep your mouth shut."  The revulsion that made Rearden turn his face away contained a spasm of pity. There was an instant when he wanted to seize his brother's shoulders, to shake him, to cry: How could you do this to yourself? How did you come to a stage where this is all that's left of you? Why did you let the wonderful fact of your own existence go by? . . . He looked away. He knew it was useless.  He noted, in weary contempt, that the three at the table remained silent. Through all the years past, his consideration for them had brought him nothing but their maliciously righteous reproaches. Where was their righteousness now? Now was the time to stand on their code of justice-if justice had been any part of their code. Why didn't they throw at him all those accusations of cruelty and selfishness, which he had come to accept as the eternal chorus to his life? What had permitted them to do it for years? He knew that the words he heard in his mind were the key to the answer: The sanction of the victim.  "Don't let's quarrel," said his mother, her voice cheerless and vague. "It's Thanksgiving Day."  When he looked at Lillian, he caught a glance that made him certain she had watched him for a long time: its quality was panic.  He got up. "You will please excuse me now," he said to the table at large.  "Where are you going?" asked Lillian sharply.  He stood looking at her for a deliberate moment, as if to confirm the meaning she would read in his answer: "To New York."  She jumped to her feet. "Tonight?"  "Now,"  "You can't go to New York tonight!" Her voice was not loud, but it had the imperious helplessness of a shriek. "This is not the time when you can afford it. When you can afford to desert your family, I mean. You ought to think about the matter of clean hands. You're not in a position to permit yourself anything which you know to be depravity."  By what code?-thought Rearden-by what standard?  "Why do you wish to go to New York tonight?"  "I think, Lillian, for the same reason that makes you wish to stop me."  "Tomorrow is your trial."  "That is what I mean."  He made a movement to turn, and she raised her voice: "I don't want you to go!" He smiled. It was the first time he had smiled at her in the past three months; it was not the kind of smile she could care to see. "I forbid you to leave us tonight!"  He turned and left the room.  Sitting at the wheel of his car, with the glassy, frozen road flying at his face and down under the wheels at sixty miles an hour, he let the thought of his family drop away from him-and the vision of their faces went rolling back into the abyss of speed that swallowed the bare trees and lonely structures of the roadside. There was little traffic, and few lights in the distant clusters of the towns he passed; the emptiness of inactivity was the only sign of a holiday. A hazy glow, rusted by frost, flashed above the roof of a factory once in a rare while, and a cold wind shrieked through the joints of his car, beating the canvas top against the metal frame.  By some dim sense of contrast, which he did not define, the thought of his family was replaced by the thought of his encounter with the Wet Nurse, the Washington boy of his mills.  At the time of his indictment, he had discovered that the boy had known about his deal with Danagger, yet had not reported it to anyone.  "Why didn't you inform your friends about me?" he had asked.  The boy had answered brusquely, not looking at him, "Didn't want to."  "It was part of your job to watch precisely for things of that kind, wasn't it?"  "Yeah."  "Besides, your friends would have been delighted to hear it."  "I know."  "Didn't you know what a valuable piece of information it was and what a stupendous trade you could have pulled with those friends of yours in Washington whom you offered to me once-remember?-the friends who always 'occasion expenses'?" The boy had not answered.  "It could have made your career at the very top level. Don't tell me that you didn't know it."  "I knew it."  "Then why didn't you make use of it?"  "I didn't want to."  "Why not?"  "Don't know."  The boy had stood, glumly avoiding Rearden's eyes, as if trying to avoid something incomprehensible within himself. Rearden had laughed.  "Listen, Non-Absolute, you're playing with fire. Better go and murder somebody fast, before you let it get you-that reason that stopped you from turning informer-or else it will blast your career to hell."  The boy had not answered.  This morning, Rearden had gone to his office as usual, even though the rest of the office building was closed. At lunch time, he had stopped at the rolling mills and had been astonished to find the Wet Nurse standing there, alone in a corner, ignored by everybody, watching the work with an air of childish enjoyment.  "What are you doing here today?" Rearden had asked. "Don't you know it's a holiday?"  "Oh, I let the girls off, but I just came in to finish some business."  "What business?"  "Oh, letters and . . . Oh, hell, I signed three letters and sharpened my pencils, I know I didn't have to do it today, but I had nothing to do at home and . . . I get lonesome away from this place."  "Don't you have any family?"  "No . . . not to speak of. What about you, Mr. Rearden? Don't you have any?"  "I guess-not to speak of."  "I like this place. I like to hang around. . . . You know, Mr. Rearden, what I studied to be was a metallurgist."  Walking away, Rearden had turned to glance back and had caught the Wet Nurse looking after him as a boy would look at the hero of his childhood's favorite adventure story. God help the poor little bastard!-he had thought.  God help them all-he thought, driving through the dark streets of a small town, borrowing, in contemptuous pity, the words of their belief which he had never shared. He saw newspapers displayed on metal stands, with the black letters of headlines screaming to empty corners: "Railroad Disaster." He had heard the news on the radio, that afternoon: there had been a wreck on the main line of Taggart Transcontinental, near Rockland, Wyoming; a split rail had sent a freight train crashing over the edge of a canyon. Wrecks on the Taggart main line were becoming more frequent-the track was wearing out-the track which, less than eighteen months ago, Dagny was planning to rebuild, promising him a journey from coast to coast on his own Metal.  She had spent a year, picking worn rail from abandoned branches to patch the rail of the main line. She had spent months fighting the men of Jim's Board of Directors, who said that the national emergency was only temporary and a track that had lasted for ten years could well last for another winter, until spring, when conditions would improve, as Mr. Wesley Mouch had promised. Three weeks ago, she had made them authorize the purchase of sixty thousand tons of new rail; it could do no more than make a few patches across the continent in the worst divisions, but it was all she had been able to obtain from them.  She had had to wrench the money out of men deaf with panic: the freight revenues were falling at such a rate that the men of the Board had begun to tremble, staring at Jim's idea of the most prosperous year in Taggart history. She had had to order steel rail, there was no hope of obtaining an "emergency need" permission to buy Rearden Metal and no time to beg for it.  Rearden looked away from the headlines to the glow at the edge of the sky, which was the city of New York far ahead; his hands tightened on the wheel a little.  It was half past nine when he reached the city. Dagny's apartment was dark, when he let himself in with his key. He picked up the telephone and called her office. Her own voice answered: "Taggart Transcontinental."  "Don't you know it's a holiday?" he asked.  "Hello, Hank. Railroads have no holidays. Where are you calling from?"  "Your place."  "I'll be through in another half-hour."  "It's all right. Stay there. I'll come for you."  The anteroom of her office was dark, when he entered, except for the lighted glass cubbyhole of Eddie Willers. Eddie was closing his desk, getting ready to leave. He looked at Rearden, in puzzled astonishment.  "Good evening, Eddie. What is it that keeps you people so busy-the Rockland wreck?"  Eddie sighed. "Yes, Mr. Rearden."  "That's what I want to see Dagny about-about your rail."  "She's still here."  He started toward her door, when Eddie called after him hesitantly, "Mr. Rearden . . ."  He stopped. "Yes?"  "I wanted to say . . . because tomorrow is your trial . . . and whatever they do to you is supposed to be in the name of all the people . . . I just wanted to say that I . . . that it won't be in my name . . .even if there's nothing I can do about it, except to tell you . . . even if I know that that doesn't mean anything."  "It means much more than you suspect. Perhaps more than any of us suspect. Thanks, Eddie."  Dagny glanced up from her desk, when Rearden entered her office; he saw her watching him as he approached and he saw the look of weariness disappearing from her eyes. He sat down on the edge of the desk. She leaned back, brushing a strand of hair off her face, her shoulders relaxing under her thin white blouse.  "Dagny, there's something I want to tell you about the rail that you ordered. I want you to know this tonight."  She was watching him attentively; the expression of his face pulled hers into the same look of quietly solemn tension.  "I am supposed to deliver to Taggart Transcontinental, on February fifteenth, sixty thousand tons of rail, which is to give you three hundred miles of track. You will receive-for the same sum of money-eighty thousand tons of rail, which will give you five hundred miles of track. You know what material is cheaper and lighter than steel. Your rail will not be steel, it will be Rearden Metal. Don't argue, object or agree. I am not asking for your consent. You are not supposed to consent or to know anything about it. I am doing this and I alone will be responsible. We will work it so that those on your staff who'll know that you've ordered steel, won't know that you've received Rearden Metal, and those who'll know that you've received Rearden Metal, won't know that you had no permit to buy it. We will tangle the bookkeeping in such a way that if the thing should ever blow up, nobody will be able to pin anything on anybody, except on me. They might suspect that I bribed someone on your staff, or they might suspect that you were in on it, but they won't be able to prove it. I want you to give me your word that you will never admit it, no matter what happens. It's my Metal, and if there are any chances to take, it's I who'll take them. I have been planning this from the day I received your order. I have ordered the copper for it, from a source which will not betray me. I did not intend to tell you about it till later, but I changed my mind. I want you to know it tonight-because I am going on trial tomorrow for the same kind of crime."  She had listened without moving. At his last sentence, he saw a faint contraction of her cheeks and lips; it was not quite a smile, but it gave him her whole answer: pain, admiration, understanding.  Then he saw her eyes becoming softer, more painfully, dangerously alive-he took her wrist, as if the tight grasp of his fingers and the severity of his glance were to give her the support she needed-and he said sternly, "Don't thank me-this is not a favor-I am doing it in order to be able to bear my work, or else I'll break like Ken Danagger."  She whispered, "All right, Hank, I won't thank you," the tone of her voice and the look of her eyes making it a lie by the time it was uttered.  He smiled. "Give me the word I asked."  She inclined her head. "I give you my word." He released her wrist.  She added, not raising her head, "The only thing I'll say is that if they sentence you to jail tomorrow, I'll quit-without waiting for any destroyer to prompt me."  "You won't. And I don't think they'll sentence me to jail. I think they'll let me off very lightly. I have a hypothesis about it-I'll explain it to you afterwards, when I've put it to the test."  "What hypothesis?"  "Who is John Galt?" He smiled, and stood up. "That's all. We won't talk any further about my trial, tonight. You don't happen to have anything to drink in your office, have you?"  "No. But I think my traffic manager has some sort of a bar on one shelf of his filing closet."  "Do you think you could steal a drink for me, if he doesn't have it locked?"  "I'll try."  He stood looking at the portrait of Nat Taggart on the wall of her office-the portrait of a young man with a lifted head-until she returned, bringing a bottle of brandy and two glasses. He filled the glasses in silence.  "You know, Dagny, Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work."  The movement of his arm, as he raised his glass, went from the portrait-to her-to himself- to the buildings of the city beyond the window.  For a month in advance, the people who filled the courtroom had been told by the press that they would see the man who was a greedy enemy of society; but they had come to see the man who had invented Rearden Metal.  He stood up, when the judges called upon him to do so. He wore a gray suit, he had pale blue eyes and blond hair; it was not the colors that made his figure seem icily implacable, it was the fact that the suit had an expensive simplicity seldom flaunted these days, that it belonged in the sternly luxurious office of a rich corporation, that his bearing came from a civilized era and clashed with the place around him.  The crowd knew from the newspapers that he represented the evil of ruthless wealth; and-as they praised the virtue of chastity, then ran to see any movie that displayed a half-naked female on its posters-so they came to see him; evil, at least, did not have the stale hopelessness of a bromide which none believed and none dared to challenge. They looked at him without admiration-admiration was a feeling they had lost the capacity to experience, long ago; they looked with curiosity and with a dim sense of defiance against those who had told them that it was their duty to hate him.  A few years ago, they would have jeered at his air of self-confident wealth. But today, there was a slate-gray sky in the windows of the courtroom, which promised the first snowstorm of a long, hard winter; the last of the country's oil was vanishing, and the coal mines were not able to keep up with the hysterical scramble for winter supplies. The crowd in the courtroom remembered that this was the case which had cost them the services of Ken Danagger. There were rumors that the output of the Danagger Coal Company had fallen perceptibly within one month; the newspapers said that it was merely a matter of readjustment while Danagger's cousin was reorganizing the company he had taken over. Last week, the front pages had carried the story of a catastrophe on the site of a housing project under construction: defective steel girders had collapsed, killing four workmen; the newspapers had not mentioned, but the crowd knew, that the girders had come from Orren Boyle's Associated Steel.  They sat in the courtroom in heavy silence and they looked at the tall, gray figure, not with hope-they were losing the capacity to hope -but with an impassive neutrality spiked by a faint question mark; the question mark was placed over all the pious slogans they had heard for years.  The newspapers had snarled that the cause of the country's troubles, as this case demonstrated, was the selfish greed of rich industrialists; that it was men like Hank Rearden who were to blame for the shrinking diet, the falling temperature and the cracking roofs in the homes of the nation; that if it had not been for men who broke regulations and hampered the government's plans, prosperity would have been achieved long ago; and that a man like Hank Rearden was prompted by nothing but the profit motive. This last was stated without explanation or elaboration, as if the words "profit motive" were the self-evident brand of ultimate evil.  The crowd remembered that these same newspapers, less than two years ago, had screamed that the production of Rearden Metal should be forbidden, because its producer was endangering people's lives for the sake of his greed; they remembered that the man in gray had ridden in the cab of the first engine to run over a track of his own Metal; and that he was now on trial for the greedy crime of withholding from the public a load of the Metal which it had been his greedy crime to offer in the public market.  According to the procedure established by directives, cases of this kind were not tried by a jury, but by a panel of three judges appointed by the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources; the procedure, the directives had stated, was to be informal and democratic.  The judge's bench had been removed from the old Philadelphia courtroom for this occasion, and replaced by a table on a wooden platform; it gave the room an atmosphere suggesting the kind of meeting where a presiding body puts something over on a mentally retarded membership.  One of the judges, acting as prosecutor, had read the charges. "You may now offer whatever plea you wish to make in your own defense," he announced.  Facing the platform, his voice inflectionless and peculiarly clear, Hank Rearden answered: "I have no defense."  "Do you-" The judge stumbled; he had not expected it to be that easy. "Do you throw yourself upon the mercy of this court?"  "I do not recognize this court's right to try me."  "What?"  "I do not recognize this court's right to try me."  "But, Mr. Rearden, this is the legally appointed court to try this particular category of crime."  "I do not recognize my action as a crime."  "But you have admitted that you have broken our regulations controlling the sale of your Metal."  "I do not recognize your right to control the sale of my Metal."  "Is it necessary for me to point out that your recognition was not required?"  "No. I am fully aware of it and I am acting accordingly."  He noted the stillness of the room. By the rules of the complicated pretense which all those people played for one another's benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none; they sat still; they understood.  "Do you mean that you are refusing to obey the law?" asked the judge.  "No. I am complying with the law-to the letter. Your law holds that my life, my work and my property may be disposed of without my consent. Very well, you may now dispose of me without my participation in the matter. I will not play the part of defending myself, where no defense is possible, and I will not simulate the illusion of dealing with a tribunal of justice."  "But, Mr. Rearden, the law provides specifically that you are to be given an opportunity to present your side of the case and to defend yourself."  "A prisoner brought to trial can defend himself only if there is an objective principle of justice recognized by his judges, a principle upholding his rights, which they may not violate and which he can invoke. The law, by which you are trying me, holds that there are no principles, that I have no rights and that you may do with me whatever you please. Very well. Do it."  "Mr. Rearden, the law which you are denouncing is based on the highest principle-the principle of the public good."  "Who is the public? What does it hold as its good? There was a time when men believed that the good was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values and that no man had the right to seek his good through the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to be their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it-well, so does any burglar. There is only this difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act."  A group of seats at the side of the courtroom was reserved for the prominent visitors who had come from New York to witness the trial. Dagny sat motionless and her face showed nothing but a solemn attention, the attention of listening with the knowledge that the flow of his words would determine the course of her life. Eddie Willers sat beside her. James Taggart had not come. Paul Larkin sat hunched forward, his face thrust out, pointed like an animal's muzzle, sharpened by a look of fear now turning into malicious hatred. Mr. Mowen, who sat beside him, was a man of greater innocence and smaller understanding; his fear was of a simpler nature; he listened in bewildered indignation and he whispered to Larkin, "Good God, now he's done it! Now he'll convince the whole country that all businessmen are enemies of the public good!"  "Are we to understand," asked the judge, "that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?"  "I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals."  "What . . . what do you mean?"  "I hold that there is no clash of interests among men who do not demand the unearned and do not practice human sacrifices."  "Are we to understand that if the public deems it necessary to curtail your profits, you do not recognize its right to do so?"  "Why, yes, I do. The public may curtail my profits any time it wishes-by refusing to buy my product."  "We are speaking of . . . other methods."  "Any other method of curtailing profits is the method of looters -and I recognize it as such."  "Mr. Rearden, this is hardly the way to defend yourself."  "I said that I would not defend myself."  "But this is unheard of! Do you realize the gravity of the charge against you?"  "I do not care to consider it."  "Do you realize the possible consequences of your stand?&quo............