"Dominique, who was he?"

She whirled to face him. Then he saw her eyes narrowing. He saw her lips relaxing, growing fuller, softer, her mouth lengthening slowly into a faint smile, without opening. She answered, looking straight at him:

"A workman in the granite quarry."

She succeeded; he laughed aloud.

"Serves me right, Dominique. I shouldn't suspect the impossible."

"Peter, isn't it strange? It was you that I thought I could make myself want, at one time."

"Why is that strange?"

"Only in thinking how little we know about ourselves. Some day you'll know the truth about yourself too, Peter, and it will be worse for you than for most of us. But you don't have to think about it. It won't come for a long time."

"You did want me, Dominique?"

"I thought I could never want anything and you suited that so well."

"I don't know what you mean. I don't know what you ever think you're saying. I know that I'll always love you. And I won't let you disappear again. Now that you're back ... "

"Now that I'm back, Peter, I don't want to see you again. Oh, I'll have to see you when we run into each other, as we will, but don't call on me. Don't come to see me. I'm not trying to offend you, Peter. It's not that. You've done nothing to make me angry. It's something in myself that I don't want to face again. I'm sorry to choose you as the example. But you suit so well. You — Peter, you're everything I despise in the world and I don't want to remember how much I despise it. If I let myself remember — I'll return to it. This is not an insult to you, Peter. Try to understand that. You're not the worst of the world. You're its best. That's what's frightening. If I ever come back to you — don't let me come. I'm saying this now because I can, but if I come back to you, you won't be able to stop me, and now is the only time when I can warn you."

"I don't know," he said in cold fury, his lips stiff, "what you're talking about."

"Don't try to know. It doesn't matter. Let's just stay away from each other. Shall we?"

"I'll never give you up."

She shrugged. "All right, Peter. This is the only time I've ever been kind to you. Or to anyone."

ROGER ENRIGHT had started life as a coal miner in Pennsylvania. On his way to the millions he now owned, no one had ever helped him. "That," he explained, "is why no one has ever stood in my way." A great many things and people had stood in his way, however; but he had never noticed them. Many incidents of his long career were not admired; none was whispered about. His career had been glaring and public like a billboard. He made a poor subject for blackmailers or debunking biographers. Among the wealthy he was disliked for having become wealthy so crudely.

He hated bankers, labor unions, women, evangelists and the stock exchange. He had never bought a share of stock nor sold a share in any of his enterprises, and he owned his fortune single-handed, as simply as if he carried all his cash in his pocket. Besides his oil business he owned a publishing house, a restaurant, a radio shop, a garage, a plant manufacturing electric refrigerators. Before each new venture he studied the field for a long time, then proceeded to act as if he had never heard of it, upsetting all precedent. Some of his ventures were successful, others failed. He continued running them all with ferocious energy. He worked twelve hours a day.

When he decided to erect a building, he spent six months looking for an architect. Then he hired Roark at the end of their first interview, which lasted half an hour. Later, when the drawings were made, he gave orders to proceed with construction at once. When Roark began to speak about the drawings, Enright interrupted him: "Don't explain. It's no use explaining abstract ideals to me. I've never had any ideals. People say I'm completely immoral. I go only by what I like. But I do know what I like."

Roark never mentioned the attempt he had made to reach Enright, nor his interview with the bored secretary. Enright learned of it somehow. Within five minutes the secretary was discharged, and within ten minutes he was walking out of the office, as ordered, in the middle of a busy day, a letter left half typed in his machine.

Roark reopened his office, the same big room on the top of an old building. He enlarged it by the addition of an adjoining room — for the draftsmen he hired in order to keep up with the planned lightning schedule of construction. The draftsmen were young and without much experience. He had never heard of them before and he did not ask for letters of recommendation. He chose them from among many applicants, merely by glancing at their drawings for a few minutes.

In the crowded tension of the days that followed he never spoke to them, except of their work. They felt, entering the office in the morning, that they had no private lives, no significance and no reality save the overwhelming reality of the broad sheets of paper on their tables. The place seemed cold and soulless like a factory, until they looked at him; then they thought that it was not a factory, but a furnace fed on their bodies, his own first.

There were times when he remained in the office all night. They found him still working when they returned in the morning. He did not seem tired. Once he stayed there for two days and two nights in succession. On the afternoon of the third day he fell asleep, half lying across his table. He awakened in a few hours, made no comment and walked from one table to another, to see what had been done. He made corrections, his words sounding as if nothing had interrupted a thought begun some hours ago.

"You're unbearable when you're working, Howard," Austen Heller told him one evening, even though he had not spoken of his work at all.

"Why?" he asked, astonished.

"It's uncomfortable to be in the same room with you. Tension is contagious, you know."

"What tension? I feel completely natural only when I'm working."

"That's it. You're completely natural only when you're one inch from bursting into pieces. What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it's only a building. It's not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it."

"Isn't it?"

He did not think of Dominique often, but when he did, the thought was not a sudden recollection, it was the acknowledgment of a continuous presence that needed no acknowledgment. He wanted her. He knew where to find her. He waited. It amused him to wait, because he knew that the waiting was unbearable to her. He knew that his absence bound her to him in a manner more complete and humiliating than his presence could enforce. He was giving her time to attempt an escape, in order to let her know her own helplessness when he chose to see her again. She would know that the attempt itself had been of his choice, that it had been only another form of mastery. Then she would be ready either to kill him or to come to him of her own will. The two acts would be equal in her mind. He wanted her brought to this. He waited.

The construction of the Enright House was about to begin, when Roark was summoned to the office of Joel Sutton. Joel Sutton, a successful businessman, was planning the erection of a huge office building. Joel Sutton had based his success on the faculty of understanding nothing about people. He loved everybody. His love admitted no distinctions. It was a great leveler; it could hold no peaks and no hollows, as the surface of a bowl of molasses could not hold them.

Joe Sutton met Roark at a dinner given by Enright. Joel Sutton liked Roark. He admired Roark. He saw no difference between Roark and anyone else. When Roark came to his office, Joel Sutton declared: