James Taggart reached into the pocket of his dinner jacket, pulled out the first wad of paper he found, which was a hundred-dollar bill, and dropped it into the beggar's hand.  He noticed that the beggar pocketed the money in a manner as indifferent as his own. "Thanks, bud." said the beggar contemptuously, and walked away.  James Taggart remained still in the middle of the sidewalk, wondering what gave him a sense of shock and dread. It was not the man's insolence-he had not sought any gratitude, he had not been moved by pity, his gesture had been automatic and meaningless. It was that the beggar acted as if he would have been indifferent had he received a hundred dollars or a dime or, failing to find any help whatever, had seen himself dying of starvation within this night. Taggart shuddered and walked brusquely on, the shudder serving to cut off the realization that the beggar's mood matched his own.  The walls of the street around him had the stressed, unnatural clarity of a summer twilight, while an orange haze filled the channels of intersections and veiled the tiers of roofs, leaving him on a shrinking remnant of ground. The calendar in the sky seemed to stand insistently out of the haze, yellow like a page of old parchment, saying: August 5, No-he thought, in answer to things he had not named-it was not true, he felt fine, that's why he wanted to do something tonight. He could not admit to himself that his peculiar restlessness came from a desire to experience pleasure; he could not admit that the particular pleasure he wanted was that of celebration, because he could not admit what it was that he wanted to celebrate.  This had been a day of intense activity, spent on words floating as vaguely as cotton, yet achieving a purpose as precisely as an adding machine, summing up to his full satisfaction. But his purpose and the nature of his satisfaction had to be kept as carefully hidden from himself as they had been from others; and his sudden craving for pleasure was a dangerous breach.  The day had started with a small luncheon in the hotel suite of a visiting Argentinian legislator, where a few people of various nationalities had talked at leisurely length about the climate of Argentina, its soil, its resources, the needs of its people, the value of a dynamic, progressive attitude toward the future-and had mentioned, as the briefest topic of conversation, that Argentina would be declared a People's State within two weeks.  It had been followed by a few cocktails at the home of Orren Boyle, with only one unobtrusive gentleman from Argentina sitting silently in a corner, while two executives from Washington and a few friends of unspecified positions had talked about national resources, metallurgy, mineralogy, neighborly duties and the welfare of the globe-and had mentioned that a loan of four billion dollars would be granted within three weeks to the People's State of Argentina and the People's State of Chile.  It had been followed by a small cocktail party in a private room of the bar built like a cellar on the roof of a skyscraper, an informal party given by him, James Taggart, for the directors of a recently formed company, The Interneighborly Amity and Development Corporation, of which Orren Boyle was president and a slender, graceful, overactive man from Chile was treasurer, a man whose name was Senor Mario Martinez, but whom Taggart was tempted, by some resemblance of spirit, to call Senor Cuffy Meigs. Here they had talked about golf, horse races, boat races, automobiles and women. It had not been necessary to mention, since they all knew it, that the Interneighborly Amity and Development Corporation had an exclusive contract to operate, on a twenty-year "managerial lease", all the industrial properties of the People's States of the Southern Hemisphere.  The last event of the day had been a large dinner reception at the home of Senor Rodrigo Gonzales, a diplomatic representative of Chile.  No one had heard of Senor Gonzales a year ago, but he had become famous for the parties he had given in the past six months, ever since his arrival in New York. His guests described him as a progressive businessman. He had lost his property-it was said-when Chile, becoming a People's State, had nationalized all properties, except those belonging to citizens of backward, non-People's countries, such as Argentina; but he had adopted an enlightened attitude and had joined the new regime, placing himself in the service of his country. His home in New York occupied an entire floor of an exclusive residential hotel.  He had a fat, blank face and the eyes of a killer. Watching him at tonight's reception, Taggart had concluded that the man was impervious to any sort of feeling, he looked as if a knife could slash, unnoticed, through his pendulous layers of flesh-except that there was a lewd, almost sexual relish in the way he rubbed his feet against the rich pile of his Persian rugs, or patted the polished arm of his chair, or folded his lips about a cigar. His wife, the Senora Gonzales, was a small, attractive woman, not as beautiful as she assumed, but enjoying the reputation of a beauty by means of a violent nervous energy and an odd manner of loose, warm, cynical self-assertiveness that seemed to promise anything and to absolve anyone. It was known that her particular brand of trading was her husband's chief asset, in an age when one traded, not goods, but favors-and, watching her among the guests, Taggart had found amusement in wondering what deals had been made, what directives issued, what industries destroyed in exchange for a few chance nights, which most of those men had had no reason to seek and, perhaps, could no longer remember. The party had bored him, there had been only half a dozen persons for whose sake he had put in an appearance, and it had not been necessary to speak to that half-dozen, merely to be seen and to exchange a few glances. Dinner had been about to be served, when he had heard what he had come to hear: Senor Gonzales had mentioned-the smoke of his cigar weaving over the half-dozen men who had drifted toward his armchair-that by agreement with the future People's State of Argentina, the properties of d'Anconia Copper would be nationalized by the People's State of Chile, in less than a month, on September 2.  It had all gone as Taggart had expected; the unexpected had come when, on hearing those words, he had felt an irresistible urge to escape. He had felt incapable of enduring the boredom of the dinner, as if some other form of activity were needed to greet the achievement of this night. He had walked out into the summer twilight of the streets, feeling as if he were both pursuing and pursued: pursuing a pleasure which nothing could give him, in celebration of a feeling which he dared not name-pursued by the dread of discovering what motive had moved him through the planning of tonight's achievement and what aspect of it now gave him this feverish sense of gratification.  He reminded himself that he would sell his d'Anconia Copper stock, which had never rallied fully after its crash of last year, and he would purchase shares of the Inter-neighborly Amity and Development Corporation, as agreed with his friends, which would bring him a fortune. But the thought brought him nothing but boredom; this was not the thing he wanted to celebrate.  He tried to force himself to enjoy it: money, he thought, had been his motive, money, nothing worse. Wasn't that a normal motive? A valid one? Wasn't that what they all were after, the Wyatts, the Reardens, the d'Anconias? . . . He jerked his head to stop it: he felt as if his thoughts were slipping down a dangerous blind alley, the end of which he must never permit himself to see.  No-he thought bleakly, in reluctant admission-money meant nothing to him any longer. He had thrown dollars about by the hundreds-at that party he had given today-for unfinished drinks, for uneaten delicacies, for unprovoked tips and unexpected whims, for a long distance phone call to Argentina because one of the guests had wanted to check the exact version of a smutty story he had started telling, for the spur of any moment, for the clammy stupor of knowing that it was easier to pay than to think.  "You've got nothing to worry about, under that Railroad Unification Plan," Orren Boyle had giggled to him drunkenly. Under the Railroad Unification Plan, a local railroad had gone bankrupt in North Dakota, abandoning the region to the fate of a blighted area, the local banker had committed suicide, first killing his wife and children-a freight train had been taken off the schedule in Tennessee, leaving a local factory without transportation at a day's notice, the factory owner's son had quit college and was now in jail, awaiting execution for a murder committed with a gang of raiders-a way station had been closed in Kansas, and the station agent, who had wanted to be a scientist, had given up his studies and become a dishwasher-that he, James Taggart, might sit in a private barroom and pay for the alcohol pouring down Orren Boyle's throat, for the waiter who sponged Boyle's garments when he spilled his drink over his chest, for the carpet burned by the cigarettes of an ex-pimp from Chile who did not want to take the trouble of reaching for an ashtray across a distance of three feet.  It was not the knowledge of his indifference to money that now gave him a shudder of dread. It was the knowledge that he would be equally indifferent, were he reduced to the state of the beggar. There had been a time when he had felt some measure of guilt-in no clearer a form than a touch of irritation-at the thought that he shared the sin of greed, which he spent his time denouncing. Now he was hit by the chill realization that, in fact, he had never been a hypocrite: in full truth, he had never cared for money. This left another hole gaping open before him, leading into another blind alley which he could not risk seeing.  I just want to do something tonight!-he cried soundlessly to someone at large, in protest and in demanding anger-in protest against whatever it was that kept forcing these thoughts into his mind-in anger at a universe where some malevolent power would not permit him to find enjoyment without the need to know what he wanted or why.  What do you want?-some enemy voice kept asking, and he walked faster, trying to escape it. It seemed to him that his brain was a maze where a blind alley opened at every turn, leading into a fog that hid an abyss. It seemed to him that he was running, while the small island of safety was shrinking and nothing but those alleys would soon be left. It was like the remnant of clarity in the street around him, with the haze rolling in to fill all exits. Why did it have to shrink?-he thought in panic. This was the way he had lived all his life-keeping his eyes stubbornly, safely on the immediate pavement before him, craftily avoiding the sight of his road, of corners, of distances, of pinnacles. He had never intended going anywhere, he had wanted to be free of progression, free of the yoke of a straight line, he had never wanted his years to add up to any sum-what had summed them up?-why had he reached some unchosen destination where one could no longer stand still or retreat? "Look where you're going, brother!" snarled some voice, while an elbow pushed him back-and he realized that he had collided with some large, ill-smelling figure and that he had been running.  He slowed his steps and admitted into his mind a recognition of the streets he had chosen in his random escape. He had not wanted to know that he was going home to his wife. That, too, was a fogbound alley, but there was no other left to him.  He knew-the moment he saw Cherryl's silent, poised figure as she rose at his entrance into her room-that this was more dangerous than he had allowed himself to know and that he would not find what he wanted. But danger, to him, was a signal to shut off his sight, suspend his judgment and pursue an unaltered course, on the unstated premise that the danger would remain unreal by the sovereign power of his wish not to see it-like a foghorn within him, blowing, not to sound a warning, but to summon the fog.  "Why, yes, I did have an important business banquet to attend, but I changed my mind, I felt like having dinner with you tonight," he said in the tone of a compliment-but a quiet "I see" was the only answer he obtained.  He felt irritation at her unastonished manner and her pale, unrevealing face. He felt irritation at the smooth efficiency with which she gave instructions to the servants, then at finding himself in the candlelight of the dining room, facing her across a perfectly appointed table, with two crystal cups of fruit in silver bowls of ice between them.  It was her poise that irritated him most; she was no longer an incongruous little freak, dwarfed by the luxury of the residence which a famous artist had designed; she matched it. She sat at the table as if she were the kind of hostess that room had the right to demand. She wore a tailored housecoat of russet-colored brocade that blended with the bronze of her hair, the severe simplicity of its lines serving as her only ornament. He would have preferred the jingling bracelets and rhinestone buckles of her past. Her eyes disturbed him, as they had for months: they were neither friendly nor hostile, but watchful and questioning.  "I closed a big deal today," he said, his tone part boastful, part pleading. "A deal involving this whole continent and half a dozen governments."  He realized that the awe, the admiration, the eager curiosity he had expected, belonged to the face of the little shop girl who had ceased to exist. He saw none of it in the face of his wife; even anger or hatred would have been preferable to her level, attentive glance; the glance was worse than accusing, it was inquiring.  "What deal, Jim?"  "What do you mean, what deal? Why are you suspicious? Why do you have to start prying at once?"  "I'm sorry. I didn't know it was confidential. You don't have to answer me."  "It's not confidential." He waited, but she remained silent. "Well? Aren't you going to say anything?"  "Why, no." She said it simply, as if to please him.  "So you're not interested at all?"  "But I thought you didn't want to discuss it."  "Oh, don't be so tricky!" he snapped. "It's a big business deal. That's what you admire, isn't it, big business? Well, it's bigger than anything those boys ever dreamed of. They spend their lives grubbing for their fortunes penny by penny, while I can do it like that"-he snapped his fingers-"just like that. It's the biggest single stunt ever pulled."  "Stunt, Jim?"  "Deal!"  "And you did it? Yourself?"  "You bet I did it! That fat fool, Orren Boyle, couldn't have swung it in a million years. This took knowledge and skill and timing"-he saw a spark of interest in her eyes-"and psychology." The spark vanished, but he went rushing heedlessly on. "One had to know how to approach Wesley, and how to keep the wrong influences away from him, and how to get Mr. Thompson interested without letting him know too much, and how to cut Chick Morrison in on it, but keep Tinky Holloway out, and how to get the right people to give a few parties for Wesley at the right time, and . . . Say, Cherryl, is there any champagne in this house?"  "Champagne?"  "Can't we do something special tonight? Can't we have a sort of celebration together?"  "We can have champagne, yes, Jim, of course."  She rang the bell and gave the orders, in her odd, lifeless, uncritical manner, a manner of meticulous compliance with his wishes while volunteering none of her own.  "You don't seem to be very impressed," he said. "But what would you know about business, anyway? You wouldn't be able to understand anything on so large a scale. Wait till September second. Wait till they hear about it."  "They? Who?"  He glanced at her, as if he had let a dangerous word slip out involuntarily, "We've organized a setup where we-me, Orren and a few friends-are going to control every industrial property south of the border."  "Whose property?"  "Why . . . the people's. This is not an old-fashioned grab for private profit. It's a deal with a mission-a worthy, public-spirited mission-to manage the nationalized properties of the various People's States of South America, to teach their workers our modern techniques of production, to help the underprivileged who've never had a chance, to-" He broke off abruptly, though she had merely sat looking at him without shifting her glance. "You know," he said suddenly, with a cold little chuckle, "if you're so damn anxious to hide that you came from the slums, you ought to be less indifferent to the philosophy of social welfare. It's always the poor who lack humanitarian instincts. One has to be born to wealth in order to know the finer feelings of altruism."  "I've never tried to hide that I came from the slums," she said in the simple, impersonal tone of a factual correction. "And I haven't any sympathy for that welfare philosophy. I've seen enough of them to know what makes the kind of poor who want something for nothing." He did not answer, and she added suddenly, her voice astonished, but firm, as if in final confirmation of a long-standing doubt, "Jim, you don't care about it, either. You don't care about any of that welfare hogwash."  "Well, if money is all that you're interested in," he snapped, "let me tell you that that deal will bring me a fortune. That's what you've always admired, isn't it, wealth?"  "It depends."  "I think I'll end up as one of the richest men in the world," he said; he did not ask what her admiration depended upon. "There's nothing I won't be able to afford. Nothing. Just name it. I can give you anything you want. Go on, name it."  "I don't want anything, Jim."  "But I'd like to give you a present! To celebrate the occasion, see? Anything you take it into your head to ask. Anything. I can do it. I want to show you that I can do it. Any fancy you care to name."  "I haven't any fancies."  "Oh, come on! Want a yacht?"  "No."  "Want me to buy you the whole neighborhood where you lived in Buffalo?"  "No."  "Want the crown jewels of the People's State of England? They can be had, you know. That People's State has been hinting about it on the black market for a long time. But there aren't any old-fashioned tycoons left who're able to afford it. I'm able to afford it-or will be, after September second. Want it?"  "No."  "Then what do you want?"  "I don't want anything, Jim."  "But you've got to! You've got to want something, damn you!"  She looked at him, faintly startled, but otherwise indifferent.  "Oh, all right, I'm sorry," he said; he seemed astonished by his own outbreak. "I just wanted to please you," he added sullenly, "but I guess you can't understand it at all. You don't know how important it is. You don't know how big a man you're married to."  "I'm trying to find out," she said slowly, "Do you still think, as you used to, that Hank Rearden is a great man?"  "Yes, Jim, I do."  "Well, I've got him beaten. I'm greater than any of them, greater than Rearden and greater than that other lover of my sister's, who-"  He stopped, as if he had slid too far.  "Jim," she asked evenly, "what is going to happen on September second?"  He glanced up at her, from under his forehead-a cold glance, while his muscles creased into a semi-smile, as if in cynical breach of some hallowed restraint. "They're going to nationalize d'Anconia Copper," he said.  He heard the long, harsh roll of a motor, as a plane went by somewhere in the darkness above the roof, then a thin tinkle, as a piece of ice settled, melting, in the silver bowl of his fruit cup-before she answered. She said, "He was your friend, wasn't he?"  "Oh, shut up!"  He remained silent, not looking at her. When his eyes came back to her face, she was still watching him and she spoke first, her voice oddly stern: "What your sister did in her radio broadcast was great."  "Yes, I know, I know, you've been saying that for a month."  "You've never answered me."  "What is there to ans . . . ?"  "Just as your friends in Washington have never answered her." He remained silent. "Jim, I'm not dropping the subject." He did not answer.  "Your friends in Washington never uttered a word about it. They did not deny the things she said, they did not explain, they did not try to justify themselves. They acted as if she had never spoken. I think they're hoping that people will forget it. Some people will. But the rest of us know what she said and that your friends were afraid to fight her."  "That's not true! The proper action was taken and the incident is closed and I don't see why you keep bringing it up."  "What action?"  "Bertram Scudder was taken off the air, as a program not in the public interest at the present time."  "Does that answer her?"  "It closes the issue and there's nothing more to be said about it."  "About a government that works by blackmail and extortion?"  "You can't say that nothing was done. It's been publicly announced that Scudder's programs were disruptive, destructive and untrustworthy."  "Jim, I want to understand this. Scudder wasn't on her side-he was on yours. He didn't even arrange that broadcast. He was acting on orders from Washington, wasn't he?"  "I thought you didn't like Bertram Scudder."  "I didn't and I don't, but-"  "Then what do you care?"  "But he was innocent, as far as your friends were concerned, wasn't he?"  "I wish you wouldn't bother with politics. You talk like a fool."  "He was innocent, wasn't he?"  "So what?"  She looked at him, her eyes incredulously wide. "Then they just made him the scapegoat, didn't they?"  "Oh, don't sit there looking like Eddie Willers!"  "Do I? I like Eddie Willers. He's honest."  "He's a damn half-wit who doesn't have the faintest idea of how to deal with practical reality!"  "But you do, don't you, Jim?"  "You bet I do!"  "Then couldn't you have helped Scudder?"  "I?" He burst into helpless, angry laughter. "Oh, why don't you grow up? I did my best to get Scudder thrown to the lions! Somebody had to be. Don't you know that it was my neck, if some other hadn't been found?"  "Your neck? Why not Dagny's, if she was wrong? Because she wasn't?"  "Dagny is in an entirely different category! It had to be Scudder or me."  "Why?"  "And it's much better for national policy to let it be Scudder. This way, it's not necessary to argue about what she said-and if anybody brings it up, we start howling that it was said on Scudder's program and that Scudder's programs have been discredited and that Scudder is a proven fraud and liar, etc., etc.-and do you think the public will be able to unscramble it? Nobody's ever trusted Bertram Scudder, anyway. Oh, don't stare at me like that! Would you rather they'd picked me to discredit?"  "Why not Dagny? Because her speech could not be discredited?"  "If you're so damn sorry for Bertram Scudder, you should have seen him try his damndest to make them break my neck! He's been doing that for years-how do you think he got to where he was, except by climbing on carcasses? He thought he was pretty powerful, too-you should have seen how the big business tycoons used to be afraid of him! But he got himself outmaneuvered, this time. This time, he belonged to the wrong faction."  Dimly, through the pleasant stupor of relaxing, of sprawling back in his chair and smiling, he knew that this was the enjoyment he wanted: to be himself. To be himself-he thought, in the drugged, precarious state of floating past the deadliest of his blind alleys, the one that led to the question of what was himself.  "You see, he belonged to the Tinky Holloway faction. It was pretty much of a seesaw for a while, between the Tinky Holloway faction and the Chick Morrison faction. But we won. Tinky made a deal and agreed to scuttle his pal Bertram in exchange for a few things he needed from us. You should have heard Bertram howl! But he was a dead duck and he knew it."  He started on a rolling chuckle, but choked it off, as the haze cleared and he saw his wife's face. "Jim," she whispered, "is that the sort of . . . victories you're winning?"  "Oh, for Christ's sake!" he screamed, smashing his fist down on the table. "Where have you been all these years? What sort of world do you think you're living in?" His blow had upset his water glass and the water went spreading in dark stains over the lace of the tablecloth.  "I'm trying to find out," she whispered. Her shoulders were sagging and her face looked suddenly worn, an odd, aged look that seemed haggard and lost.  "I couldn't help it!" he burst out in the silence. "I'm not to blame! I have to take things as I find them! It's not I who've made this world!"  He was shocked to see that she smiled-a smile of so fiercely bitter a contempt that it seemed incredible on her gently patient face; she was not looking at him, but at some image of her own. "That's what my father used to say when he got drunk at the corner saloon instead of looking for work."  "How dare you try comparing me to-" he started, but did not finish, because she was not listening.  Her words, when she looked at him again, astonished him as completely irrelevant. "The date of that nationalization, September second," she asked, her voice wistful, "was it you who picked it?"  "No. I had nothing to do with it. It's the date of some special session of their legislature. Why?"  "It's the date of our first wedding anniversary."  "Oh? Oh, that's right!" He smiled, relieved at the change to a safe subject. "We'll have been married a year. My, it doesn't seem that long!"  "It seems much longer," she said tonelessly.  She was looking off again, and he felt in sudden uneasiness that the subject was not safe at all; he wished she would not look as if she were seeing the whole course of that year and of their marriage . . . not to get scared, but to learn-she thought-the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn . . . The words came from a sentence she had repeated to herself so often that it felt like a pillar polished smooth by the helpless weight of her body, the pillar that had supported her through the past year. She tried to repeat it, but she felt as if her hands were slipping on the polish, as if the sentence would not stave off terror any longer-because she was beginning to understand. If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn. . . . It was in the bewildered loneliness of the first weeks of her marriage that she said it to herself for the first time. She could not understand Jim's behavior, or his sullen anger, which looked like weakness, or his evasive, incomprehensible answers to her questions, which sounded like cowardice; such traits were not possible in the James Taggart whom she had married. She told herself that she could not condemn without understanding, that she knew nothing about his world, that the extent of her ignorance was the extent to which she misinterpreted his actions. She took the blame, she took the beating of self reproach-against some bleakly stubborn certainty which told her that something was wrong and that the thing she felt was fear.  "I must learn everything that Mrs. James Taggart is expected to know and to be." was the way she explained her purpose to a teacher of etiquette. She set out to learn with the devotion, the discipline, the drive of a military cadet or a religious novice. It was the only way, she thought, of earning the height which her husband had granted her on trust, of living up to his vision of her, which it was now her duty to achieve. And, not wishing to confess it to herself, she felt also that at the end of the long task she would recapture her vision of him, that knowledge would bring back to her the man she had seen on the night of his railroad's triumph.  She could not understand Jim's attitude when she told him about her lessons. He burst out laughing; she was unable to believe that the laughter had a sound of malicious contempt. "Why, Jim? Why? What are you laughing at?" He would not explain-almost as if the fact of his contempt were sufficient and required no reasons.  She could not suspect him of malice: he was too patiently generous about her mistakes. He seemed eager to display her in the best drawing rooms of the city, and he never uttered a word of reproach for her ignorance, for her awkwardness, for those terrible moments when a silent exchange of glances among the guests and a burst of blood to her cheekbones told her that she had said the wrong thing again. He showed no embarrassment, he merely watched her with a faint smile. When they came home after one of those evenings, his mood seemed affectionately cheerful. He was trying to make it easier for her, she thought-and gratitude drove her to study the harder. She expected her reward on the evening when, by some imperceptible transition, she found herself enjoying a party for the first time. She felt free to act, not by rules, but at her own pleasure, with sudden confidence that the rules had fused into a natural habit-she knew that she was attracting attention, but now, for the first time, it was not the attention of ridicule, but of admiration-she was sought after, on her own merit, she was Mrs. Taggart, she had ceased being an object of charity weighing Jim down, painfully tolerated for his sake-she was laughing gaily and seeing the smiles of response, of appreciation on the faces around her-and she kept glancing at him across the room, radiantly, like a child handing him a report card with a perfect score, begging him to be proud of her. Jim sat alone in a corner, watching her with an undecipherable glance.  He would not speak to her on their way home. "I don't know why I keep dragging myself to those parties," he snapped suddenly, tearing off his dress tie in the middle of their living room, "I've never sat through such a vulgar, boring waste of time!" "Why, Jim," she said, stunned, "I thought it was wonderful." "You would! You seemed to be quite at home-quite as if it were Coney Island. I wish you'd learn to keep your place and not to embarrass me in public." "I embarrassed you? Tonight?" "You did!" "How?" "If you don't understand it, I can't explain," he said in the tone of a mystic who implies that a lack of understanding is the confession of a shameful inferiority. "I don't understand it," she said firmly. He walked out of the room, slamming the door.  She felt that the inexplicable was not a mere blank, this time: it had a tinge of evil. From that night on, a small, hard point of fear remained within her, like the spot of a distant headlight advancing upon her down an invisible track.  Knowledge did not seem to bring her a clearer vision of Jim's world, but to make the mystery greater. She could not believe that she was supposed to feel respect for the dreary senselessness of the art shows which his friends attended, of the novels they read, of the political magazines they discussed-the art shows, where she saw the kind of drawings she had seen chalked on any pavement of her childhood's slums-the novels, that purported to prove the futility of science, industry, civilization and love, using language that her father would not have used in his drunkenest moments-the magazines, that propounded cowardly generalities, less clear and more stale than the sermons for which she had condemned the preacher of the slum mission as a mealy-mouthed old fraud.  She could not believe that these things were the culture she had so reverently looked up to and so eagerly waited to discover. She felt as if she had climbed a mountain toward a jagged shape that had looked like a castle and had found it to be the crumbling ruin of a gutted warehouse.  "Jim," she said once, after an evening spent among the men who were called the intellectual leaders of the country, "Dr. Simon Pritchett is a phony-a mean, scared old phony." "Now, really," he answered, "do you think you're qualified to pass judgment on philosophers?"  "I'm qualified to pass judgment on con men. I've seen enough of them to know one when I see him." "Now this is why I say that you'll never outgrow your background. If you had, you would have learned to appreciate Dr. Pritchett's philosophy." "What philosophy?" "If you don't understand it, I can't explain." She would not let him end the conversation on that favorite formula of his. "Jim," she said, "he's a phony, he and Balph Eubank and that whole gang of theirs-and I think you've been taken in by them." Instead of the anger she expected, she saw a brief flash of amusement in the lift of his eyelids. "That's what you think," he answered.  She felt an instant of terror at the first touch of a concept she had not known to be possible: What if Jim was not taken in by them? She could understand the phoniness of Dr. Pritchett, she thought-it was a racket that gave him an undeserved income; she could even admit the possibility, by now, that Jim might be a phony in his own business; what she could not hold inside her mind was the concept of Jim as a phony in a racket from which he gained nothing, an unpaid phony, an unvenal phony; the phoniness of a cardsharp or a con man seemed innocently wholesome by comparison. She could not conceive of his motive; she felt only that the headlight moving upon her had grown larger.  She could not remember by what steps, what accumulation of pain, first as small scratches of uneasiness, then as stabs of bewilderment, then as the chronic, nagging pull of fear, she had begun to doubt Jim's position on the railroad. It was his sudden, angry "so you don't trust me?" snapped in answer to her first, innocent questions that made her realize that she did not-when the doubt had not yet formed in her mind and she had fully expected that his answers would reassure her. She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted, "I don't care to talk shop," was his answer whenever she mentioned the railroad. She tried to plead with him once. "Jim, you know what I think of your work and how much I admire you for it." "Oh, really? What is it you married, a man or a railroad president?" "I . . . I never thought of separating the two." "Well, it is not very flattering to me." She looked at him, baffled: she had thought it was. "I'd like to believe," he said, "that you love me for myself, and not for my railroad." "Oh God, Jim," she gasped, "you didn't think that I-!" "No," he said, with a sadly generous smile, "I didn't think that you married me for my money or my position. I have never doubted you." Realizing, in stunned confusion and in tortured fairness, that she might have given him ground to misinterpret her feeling, that she had forgotten how many bitter disappointments he must have suffered at the hands of fortune-hunting women, she could do nothing but shake her head and moan, "Oh, Jim, that's not what I meant!" He chuckled softly, as at a child, and slipped his arm around her. "Do you love me?" he asked. "Yes," she whispered. "Then you must have faith in me. Love is faith, you know. Don't you see that I need it? I don't trust anyone around me, I have nothing but enemies, I am very lonely. Don't you know that I need you?"  The thing that made her pace her room-hours later, in tortured restlessness-was that she wished desperately to believe him and did not believe a word of it, yet knew that it was true. It was true, but not in the manner he implied, not in any manner or meaning she could ever hope to grasp. It was true that he needed her, but the nature of his need kept slipping past her every effort to define it. She did not know what he wanted of her. It was not flattery that he wanted, she had seen him listening to the obsequious compliments of liars, listening with a look of resentful inertness-almost the look of a drug addict at a dose inadequate to rouse him. But she had seen him look at her as if he were waiting for some reviving shot and, at times, as if he were begging. She had seen a flicker of life in his eyes whenever she granted him some sign of admiration-yet a burst of anger was his answer, whenever she named a reason for admiring him.  He seemed to want her to consider him great, but never dare ascribe any specific content to his greatness.  She did not understand the night, in mid-April, when he returned from a trip to Washington. "Hi, kid!" he said loudly, dropping a sheaf of lilac into her arms. "Happy days are here again! Just saw those flowers and thought of you. Spring is coming, baby!"  He poured himself a drink and paced the room, talking with too light, too brash a manner of gaiety. There was a feverish sparkle in his eyes, and his voice seemed shredded by some unnatural excitement. She began to wonder whether he was elated or crushed.  "I know what it is that they're planning!" he said suddenly, without transition, and she glanced up at him swiftly: she knew the sound of one of his inner explosions. "There's not a dozen people in the whole country who know it, but I do! The top boys are keeping it secret till they're ready to spring it on the nation. Will it surprise a lot of people! Will it knock them flat! A lot of people? Hell, every single person in this country! It will affect every single person. That's how important it is."  "Affect-how, Jim?"  "It will affect them! And they don't know what's coming, but I do. There they sit tonight"-he waved at the lighted windows of the city-"making plans, counting their money, hugging their children or their dreams, and they don't know, but I do, that all of it will be struck, stopped, changed!"  "Changed-for the worse or the better?"  "For the better, of course," he answered impatiently, as if it were irrelevant; his voice seemed to lose its fire and to slip into the fraudulent sound of duty. "It's a plan to save the country, to stop our economic decline, to hold things still, to achieve stability and security."  "What plan?"  "I can't tell you. It's secret. Top secret. You have no idea how many people would like to know it. There's no industrialist who wouldn't give a dozen of his best furnaces for just one hint of warning, which he's not going to get! Like Hank Rearden, for instance, whom you admire so much." He chuckled, looking off into the future.  "Jim," she asked, the sound of fear in her voice telling him what the sound of his chuckle had been like, "why do you hate Hank Rearden?"  "I don't hate him!" He whirled to her, and his face, incredibly, looked anxious, almost frightened. "I never said I hated him. Don't worry, he'll approve of the plan. Everybody will. It's for everybody's good." He sounded as if he were pleading. She felt the dizzying certainty that he was lying, yet that the plea was sincere-as if he had a desperate need to reassure her, but not about the things he said.  She forced herself to smile. "Yes, Jim, of course," she answered, wondering what instinct in what impossible kind of chaos had made her say it as if it were her part to reassure him.  The look she saw on his face was almost a smile and almost of gratitude. "1 had to tell you about it tonight. I had to tell you. I wanted you to know what tremendous issues I deal with. You always talk about my work, but you don't understand it at all, it's so much wider than you imagine. You think that running a railroad is a matter of track laying and fancy metals and getting trains there on time. But it's not. Any underling can do that. The real heart of a railroad is in Washington. My job is politics. Politics. Decisions made on a national scale, affecting everything, controlling everybody. A few words on paper, a directive-changing the life of every person in every nook, cranny and penthouse of this country!"  "Yes, Jim," she said, wishing to believe that he was, perhaps, a man of stature in the mysterious realm of Washington.  "You'll see," he said, pacing the room. "You think they're powerful -those giants of industry who're so clever with motors and furnaces? They'll be stopped! They'll be stripped! They'll be brought down! They'll be-" He noticed the way she was staring at him. "It's not for ourselves," he snapped hastily, "it's for the people. That's the difference between business and politics-we have no selfish ends in view, no private motives, we're not after profit, we don't spend our lives scrambling for money, we don't have to! That's why we're slandered and misunderstood by all the greedy profit-chasers who can't conceive of a spiritual motive or a moral ideal or . . . We couldn't help it!" he cried suddenly, whirling to her. "We had to have that plan! With everything falling to pieces and stopping, something had to be done! We had to stop them from stopping! We couldn't help it!"  His eyes were desperate; she did not know whether he was boasting or begging for forgiveness; she did not know whether this was triumph or terror. "Jim, don't you feel well? Maybe you've worked too hard and you're worn out and-"  "I've never felt better in my life!" he snapped, resuming his pacing. "You bet I've worked hard. My work is bigger than any job you can hope to imagine. It's above anything that grubbing mechanics like Rearden and my sister, are doing. Whatever they do, I can undo it. Let them build a track-I can come and break it, just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "Just like breaking a spine!"  "You want to break spines?" she whispered, trembling.  "I haven't said that!" he screamed. "What's the matter with you? I haven't said it!"  "I'm sorry, Jim!" she gasped, shocked by her own words and by the terror in his eyes. "It's just that I don't understand, but . . . but I know I shouldn't bother you with questions when you're so tired"-she was struggling desperately to convince herself-"when you have so many things on your mind . . . such . . . such great things . . .things I can't even begin to think of . . ."  His shoulders sagged, relaxing. He approached her and dropped wearily down on his knees, slipping his arms around her. "You poor little fool," he said affectionately.  She held onto him, moved by something that felt like tenderness and almost like pity. But he raised his head to glance up at her face, and it seemed to her that the look she saw in his eyes was part-gratification, part-contempt-almost as if, by some unknown kind of sanction, she had absolved him and damned herself.  It was useless-she found in the days that followed-to tell herself that these things were beyond her understanding, that it was her duty to believe in him, that love was faith. Her doubt kept growing-doubt of his incomprehensible work and of his relation to the railroad. She wondered why it kept growing in direct proportion to her self-admonitions that faith was the duty she owed him. Then, one sleepless night, she realized that her effort to fulfill that duty consisted of turning away whenever people discussed his job, of refusing to look at newspaper mentions of Taggart Transcontinental, of slamming her mind shut against any evidence and every contradiction. She stopped, aghast, struck by the question: What is it, then-faith versus truth? And realizing that part of her zeal to believe was her fear to know, she set out to learn the truth, with a cleaner, calmer sense of tightness than the effort at dutiful self-fraud had ever given her.  It did not take her long to learn. The evasiveness of the Taggart executives, when she asked a few casual questions, the stale generalities of their answers, the strain of their manner at the mention of their boss, and their obvious reluctance to discuss him-told her nothing concrete, but gave her a feeling equivalent to knowing the worst. The railroad workers were more specific-the switchmen, the gatemen, the ticket sellers whom she drew into chance conversations in the Taggart Terminal and who did not know her. "Jim Taggart? That whining, sniveling, speech-making deadhead!" "Jimmy the President? Well, I'll tell you: he's the hobo on the gravy train." "The boss? Mr. Taggart? You mean Miss Taggart, don't you?"  It was Eddie Willers who told her the whole truth. She heard that he had known Jim since childhood, and she asked him to lunch with her. When she faced him at the table, when she saw the earnest, questioning directness of his eyes and the severely literal simplicity of his words, she dropped all attempts at casual prodding, she told him what she wanted to know and why, briefly, impersonally, not appealing for help or for pity, only for truth. He answered her in the same manner. He told her the whole story, quietly, impersonally, pronouncing no verdict, expressing no opinion, never encroaching on her emotions by any sign of concern for them, speaking with the shining austerity and the awesome power of facts. He told her who ran Taggart Transcontinental.  He told her the story of the John Galt Line. She listened, and what she felt was not shock, but worse: the lack of shock, as if she had always known it. "Thank you, Mr. Willers," was all that she said when he finished.  She waited for Jim to come home, that evening, and the thing that eroded any pain or indignation, was a feeling of her own detachment, as if it did not matter to her any longer, as if some action were required of her, but it made no difference what the action would be or the consequences. It was not anger that she felt when she saw Jim enter the room, but a murky astonishment, almost as if she wondered who he was and why it should now be necessary to speak to him. She told him what she knew, briefly, in a tired, extinguished voice. It seemed to her that he understood it from her first few sentences, as if he had expected this to come sooner or later.  "Why didn't you tell me the truth?" she asked.  "So that's your idea of gratitude?" he screamed. "So that's how you feel after everything I've done for you? Everybody told me that crudeness and selfishness was all I could expect for lifting a cheap little alley cat by the scruff of her neck!"  She looked at him as if he were making inarticulate sounds that connected to nothing inside her mind. "Why didn't you tell me the truth?"  "Is that all the love you felt for me, you sneaky little hypocrite? Is that all I get in return for my faith in you?"  "Why did you lie? Why did you let me think what I thought?"  "You should be ashamed of yourself, you should be ashamed to face me or speak to me!"  "1?" The inarticulate sounds had connected, but she could not believe the sum they made. "What are you trying to do, Jim?" she asked, her voice incredulous and distant.  "Have you thought of my feelings? Have you thought of what this would do to my feelings? You should have considered my feelings first! That's the first obligation of any wife-and of a woman in your position in particular! There's nothing lower and uglier than ingratitude!"  For the flash of one instant, she grasped the unthinkable fact of a man who was guilty and knew it and was trying to escape by inducing an emotion of guilt in his victim. But she could not hold the fact inside her brain. She felt a stab of horror, the convulsion of a mind rejecting a sight that would destroy it-a stab like a swift recoil from the edge of insanity. By the time she dropped her head, closing her eyes, she knew only that she felt disgust, a sickening disgust for a nameless reason.  When she raised her head, it seemed to her-that she caught a glimpse of him watching her with the uncertain, retreating, calculating look of a man whose trick has not worked. But before she had time to believe it, his face was hidden again under an expression of injury and anger.  She said, as if she were naming her thoughts for the benefit of the rational being who was not present, but whose presence she had to assume, since no other could be addressed, "That night . . . those headlines . . . that glory . . . it was not you at all . . . it was Dagny."  "Shut up, you rotten little bitch!"  She looked at him blankly, without reaction. She looked as if nothing could reach her, because her dying words had been uttered.  He made the sound of a sob. "Cherryl, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, I take it back, I didn't mean it . . ."  She remained standing, leaning against the wall, as she had stood from the first.  He dropped down on the edge of a couch, in a posture of helpless dejection. "How could I have explained it to you?" he said in the tone of abandoning hope. "It's all so big and so complex. How could I have told you anything about a transcontinental railroad, unless you knew all the details and ramifications? How could I have explained to you my years of work, my . . . Oh, what's the use? I've always been misunderstood and I should have been accustomed to it by now, only I thought that you were different and that I had a chance."  "Jim, why did you marry me?"  He chuckled sadly. "That's what everybody kept asking me. I didn't think you'd ever ask it. Why? Because I love you."  She wondered at how strange it was that this word-which was supposed to be the simplest in the human language, the word understood by all, the universal bond among men-conveyed to her no meaning whatever. She did not know what it was that it named in his mind.  "Nobody's ever loved me," he said. "There isn't any love in the world. People don't feel. I feel things. Who cares about that? All they care for is time schedules and freight loads and money. I can't live among those people. I'm very lonely. I've always longed to find understanding. Maybe I'm just a hopeless idealist, looking for the impossible. Nobody will ever understand me."  "Jim," she said, with an odd little note of severity in her voice, "what I've struggled for all this time is to understand you."  He dropped his hand in a motion of brushing her words aside, not offensively, but sadly. "I thought you could. You're all I have. But maybe understanding is just not possible between human beings."  "Why should it be impossible? Why don't you tell me what it is that you want? Why don't you help me to understand you?"  He sighed. "That's it. That's the trouble-your asking all those why's. Your constant asking of a why for everything. What I'm talking about can't be put into words. It can't be named. It has to be felt. Either you feel it or you don't. It's not a thing of the mind, but of the heart. Don't you ever feel? Just feel, without asking all those questions? Can't you understand me as a human being, not as if I were a scientific object in a laboratory? The great understanding that transcends our shabby words and helpless minds . . . No, I guess I shouldn't look for it. But I'll always seek and hope. You're my last hope. You're all I have."  She stood at the wall, without moving.  "I need you," he wailed softly. "I’m all alone. You're not like the others. I believe in you. I trust you. What has all that money and fame and business and struggle given me? You're all I have . . . "  She stood without moving and the direction of her glance, lowered to look down at him, was the only form of recognition she gave him.  The things he said about his suffering were lies, she thought; but the suffering was real; he was a man torn by some continual anguish, which he seemed unable to tell her, but which, perhaps, she could learn to understand. She still owed him this much-she thought, with the grayness of a sense of duty-in payment for the position he had given her, which, perhaps, was all he had to give, she owed him an effort to understand him.  It was strange to feel, in the days that followed, that she had become a stranger to herself, a stranger who had nothing to want or to seek. In place of a love made by the brilliant fire of hero worship, she was left with the gnawing drabness of pity. In place of the men she had struggled to find, men who fought for their goals and refused to suffer-she was left with a man whose suffering was his only claim to value and his only offer in exchange for her life. But it made no difference to her any longer. The one who was she, had looked with eagerness at the turn of every corner ahead; the passive stranger who had taken her place, was like all the over groomed people around her, the people who said that they were adult because they did not try to think or to desire.  But the stranger was still haunted by a ghost who was herself, and the ghost had a mission to accomplish. She had to learn to understand the things that had destroyed her. She had to know, and she lived with a sense of ceaseless waiting. She had to know, even though she felt that the headlight was closer and in the moment of knowledge she would be struck by the wheels.  What do you want of me?-was the question that kept beating in her mind as a clue. What do you want of me?-she kept crying soundlessly, at dinner tables, in drawing rooms, on sleepless nights- crying it to Jim and those who seemed to share his secret, to Balph Eubank, to Dr. Simon Pritchett-what do you want of me? She did not ask it aloud; she knew that they would not answer. What do you want of me? -she asked, feeling as if she were running, but no way were open to escape. What do you want of me?-she asked, looking at the whole long torture of her marriage that had not lasted the full span of one year.  "What do you want of me?" she asked aloud-and saw that she was sitting at the table in her dining room, looking at Jim, at his feverish face, and at a drying stain of water on the table. She did not know how long a span of silence had stretched between them, she was startled by her own voice and by the--question she had not intended to utter. She did not expect him to understand it, he had never seemed to understand much simpler queries-and she shook her head, struggling to recapture the reality of the present.  She was startled to see him looking at her with a touch of derision, as if he were mocking her estimate of his understanding.  "Love," he answered.  She felt herself sagging with hopelessness, in the face of that answer which was at once so simple and so meaningless.  "You don't love me," he said accusingly. She did not answer. "You don't love me or you wouldn't ask such a question."  "I did love you once," she said dully, "but it wasn't what you wanted. I loved you for your courage, your ambition, your ability. But it wasn't real, any of it."  His lower lip swelled a little in a faint, contemptuous thrust. "What a shabby idea of love!" he said.  "Jim, what is it that you want to be loved for?"  "What a cheap shopkeeper's attitude!"  She did not speak; she looked at him, her eyes stretched by a silent question.  "To be loved for!" he said, his voice grating with mockery and righteousness. "So you think that love is a matter of mathematics, of exchange, of weighing and measuring, like a pound of butter on a grocery counter? I don't want to be loved for anything. I want to be loved for myself-not for anything I do or have or say or think. For myself-not for my body or mind or words or works or actions."  "But then . . . what is yourself?"  "If you loved me, you wouldn't ask it." His voice had a shrill note of nervousness, as if he were swaying dangerously between caution and some blindly heedless impulse. "You wouldn't ask. You'd know. You'd feel it. Why do you always try to tag and label everything? Can't you rise above those petty materialistic definitions? Don't you ever feel-just feel?"  "Yes. Jim, I do," she said, her voice low. "But I am trying not to, because . . . because what I feel is fear."  "Of me?" he asked hopefully.  "No, not exactly. Not fear of what you can do to me, but of what you are."  He dropped his eyelids with the swiftness of slamming a door-but she caught a flash of his eyes and the flash, incredibly, was terror.  "You're not capable of love, you cheap little gold-digger!" he cried suddenly, in a tone stripped of all color but the desire to hurt. "Yes, I said gold-digger. There are many forms of it, other than greed for money, other and worse. You're a gold-digger of the spirit. You didn't marry me for my cash-but you married me for my ability or courage or whatever value it was that you set as the price of your love!"  "Do you want . . . love . . . to be . . . causeless?"  "Love is its own cause! Love is above causes and reasons. Love is blind. But you wouldn't be capable of it. You have the mean, scheming, calculating little soul of a shopkeeper who trades but never gives!  Love is a gift-a great, free, unconditional gift that transcends and forgives everything. What's the generosity of loving a man for his virtues?  What do you give him? Nothing. It's no more than cold justice. No more than he's earned."  Her eyes were dark with the dangerous intensity of glimpsing her goal. "You want it to be unearned," she said, not in the tone of a question, but of a verdict.  "Oh, you don't understand!"  "Yes, Jim, I do. That's what you want-that's what all of you really want-not money, not material benefits, not economic security, not any of the handouts you keep demanding." She spoke in a flat monotone, as if reciting her thoughts to herself, intent upon giving the solid identity of words to the torturous shreds of chaos twisting in her mind.  "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 sin............