"You are?" he said happily. It seemed to be the first direct communication between them. "Isn't that interesting! Mr. Toohey is getting together a little youth group of architects, too, and he's kind enough to have me in mind for chairman."

"Oh," she said and winked. "One of us?"

"Of whom?"

He did not know what he had done, but he knew that he had disappointed her in some way. She began to laugh. She sat there, looking up at him, laughing deliberately in his face, laughing ungraciously and not gaily.

"What the ... !" He controlled himself. "What's the matter, Miss Cook?"

"Oh my!" she said. "You're such a sweet, sweet boy and so pretty!"

"Mr. Toohey is a great man," he said angrily. "He's the most ... the noblest personality I've ever ... "

"Oh, yes. Mr. Toohey is a wonderful man." Her voice was strange by omission, it was flagrantly devoid of respect. "My best friend. The most wonderful man on earth. There's the earth and there's Mr. Toohey — a law of nature. Besides, think how nicely you can rhyme it: Toohey — gooey — phooey — hooey. Nevertheless, he's a saint. That's very rare. As rare as genius. I'm a genius. I want a living room without windows. No windows at all, remember that when you draw up the plans. No windows, a tile floor and a black ceiling. And no electricity. I want no electricity in my house, just kerosene lamps. Kerosene lamps with chimneys, and candles. To hell with Thomas Edison! Who was he anyway?"

Her words did not disturb him as much as her smile. It was not a smile, it was a permanent smirk raising the corners of her long mouth, making her look like a sly, vicious imp.

"And, Keating, I want the house to be ugly. Magnificently ugly. I want it to be the ugliest house in New York."

"The ... ugliest. Miss Cook?"

"Sweetheart, the beautiful is so commonplace!"

"Yes, but ... but I ... well, I don't see how I could permit myself to ... "

"Keating, where's your courage? Aren't you capable of a sublime gesture on occasion? They all work so hard and struggle and suffer, trying to achieve beauty, trying to surpass one another in beauty. Let's surpass them all! Let's throw their sweat in their face. Let's destroy them at one stroke. Let's be gods. Let's be ugly."

He accepted the commission. After a few weeks he stopped feeling uneasy about it. Wherever he mentioned this new job, he met a respectful curiosity. It was an amused curiosity, but it was respectful. The name of Lois Cook was well known in the best drawing rooms he visited. The titles of her books were flashed in conversation like the diamonds in the speaker's intellectual crown. There was always a note of challenge in the voices pronouncing them. It sounded as if the speaker were being very brave. It was a satisfying bravery; it never aroused antagonism. For an author who did not sell, her name seemed strangely famous and honored. She was the standard-bearer of a vanguard of intellect and revolt. Only it was not quite clear to him just exactly what the revolt was against. Somehow, he preferred not to know.

He designed the house as she wished it. It was a three-floor edifice, part marble, part stucco, adorned with gargoyles and carriage lanterns. It looked like a structure from an amusement park.

His sketch of it was reproduced in more publications than any other drawing he had ever made, with the exception of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. One commentator expressed the opinion that "Peter Keating is showing a promise of being more than just a bright young man with a knack for pleasing stuffy moguls of big business. He is venturing into the field of intellectual experimentation with a client such as Lois Cook." Toohey referred to the house as "a cosmic joke."

But a peculiar sensation remained in Keating's mind: the feeling of an aftertaste. He would experience a dim flash of it while working on some important structure he liked; he would experience it in the moments when he felt proud of his work. He could not identify the quality of the feeling; but he knew that part of it was a sense of shame.

Once, he confessed it to Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey laughed. "That's good for you, Peter. One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes."

DOMINIQUE had returned to New York. She returned without purpose, merely because she could not stay in her country house longer than three days after her last visit to the quarry. She had to be in the city, it was a sudden necessity, irresistible and senseless. She expected nothing of the city. But she wanted the feeling of the streets and the buildings holding her there. In the morning, when she awakened and heard the muffled roar of traffic far below, the sound was a humiliation, a reminder of where she was and why. She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame; it was as if she held a piece of the city, all the streets and rooftops outlined on the glass between her two hands.

She went out alone for long walks. She walked fast, her hands in the pockets of an old coat, its collar raised. She had told herself that she was not hoping to meet him. She was not looking for him. But she had to be out in the streets, blank, purposeless, for hours at a time.

She had always hated the streets of a city. She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear — fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met. She could not define the nature or the reason of that fear. But she had always felt its presence. She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion — to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt.

She was not free any longer. Each step through the streets hurt her now. She was tied to him — as he was tied to every part of the city. He was a nameless worker doing some nameless job, lost in these crowds, dependent on them, to be hurt by any one of them, to be shared by her with the whole city. She hated the thought of him on the sidewalks people had used. She hated the thought of a clerk handing to him a package of cigarettes across a counter. She hated the elbows touching his elbows in a subway train. She came home, after these walks, shaking with fever. She went out again the next day.

When the term of her vacation expired, she went to the office of the Banner in order to resign. Her work and her column did not seem amusing to her any longer. She stopped Alvah Scarret's effusive greetings. She said: "I just came back to tell you that I'm quitting, Alvah." He looked at her stupidly. He uttered only: "Why?"

It was the first sound from the outside world to reach her in a long time. She had always acted on the impulse of the moment, proud of the freedom to need no reasons for her actions. Now she had to face a "why?" that carried an answer she could not escape. She thought: Because of him, because she was letting him change the course of her life. It would be another violation; she could see him smiling as he had smiled on the path in the woods. She had no choice. Either course taken would be taken under compulsion: she could leave her work, because he had made her want to leave it, or she could remain, hating it, in order to keep her life unchanged, in defiance of him. The last was harder.

She raised her head. She said: "Just a joke, Alvah. Just wanted to see what you'd say. I'm not quitting."

She had been back at work for a few days when Ellsworth Toohey walked into her office.

"Hello, Dominique," he said. "Just heard you're back."

"Hello, Ellsworth."