Atlas Shrugged

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be admitted into her mind. but flowing as a dark warmth through her body, was: I would have shot him,
but not before—She raised her eyelids—and she knew that that thought was as naked to him in her eyes,
as it was to her in his. She saw his veiled glance and the tautness of his mouth, she saw him reduced to
agony, she felt herself drowned by the exultant wish to cause him pain, to see it, to watch it, to watch it
beyond her own endurance and his, then to reduce him to the helplessness of pleasure.
He got up, he looked away, and she could not tell whether it was the slight lift of his head or the tension
of his features that made his face look oddly calm and clear, as if it were stripped of emotion down to the
naked purity of its structure.
"Every man that your railroad needed and lost in the past ten years," he said, "it was I who made you
lose him." His voice had the single toned flatness and the luminous simplicity of an accountant who
reminds a reckless purchaser that cost is an absolute which cannot be escaped, "I have pulled every
girder from under Taggart Transcontinental and, if you choose to go back, I will see it collapse upon your
head."
He turned to leave the room. She stopped him. It was her voice, more than her words, that made him
stop: her voice was low, it had no quality of emotion, only of a sinking weight, and its sole color was
some dragging undertone, like an inner echo, resembling a threat; it was the voice of the plea of a person
who still retains a concept of honor, but is long past caring for it: "You want to hold me here, don't you?"
"More than anything else in the world."
"You could hold me."
"I know it"
His voice had said it with the same sound as hers. He waited, to regain his breath. When he spoke, his
voice was low and clear, with some stressed quality of awareness, which was almost the quality of a
smile of understanding: "It's your acceptance of this place that I want. What good would it do me, to
have your physical presence without any meaning? That's the kind of faked reality by which most people
cheat themselves of their lives. I'm not capable of it." He turned to go. "And neither are you. Good night,
Miss Taggart."
He walked out, into his bedroom, closing the door.
She was past the realm of thought—as she lay in bed in the darkness of her room, unable to think or to
sleep—and the moaning violence that filled her mind seemed only a sensation of her muscles, but its tone
and its twisting shades were like a pleading cry, which she knew, not as words, but as pain: Let him
come here, let him break —let it be damned, all of it, my railroad and his strike and everything we've
lived by!—let it be damned, everything we've been and are!—he would, if tomorrow I were to die—then
let me die, but tomorrow —let him come here, be it any price he names, I have nothing left that's not for
sale to him any longer—is this what it means to be an animal?—it does and I am. . . . She lay on her
back, her palms pressed to the sheet at her sides, to stop herself from rising and walking into his room,
knowing that she was capable even of that. . . .
It's not I, it's a body I can neither endure nor control. . . . But somewhere within her, not as words, but
as a radiant point of stillness, there was the presence of the judge who seemed to observe her, not in
stern condemnation any longer, but in approval and amusement, as if saying: Your body?—if he were not
what you know him to be, would your body bring you to this?—why is it his body that you want, and no
other?—do you think that you are damning them, the things you both have lived by?—are you damning