Atlas Shrugged

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 "Are you?"
"Why do you ask that?"
"I don't know. I guess I'm too used to what it's like when . . . when I can't find you."
"I'm back."
"Yes. I'll see you in a few hours." His voice broke off, as if the sentence were too enormous to believe.
"In a few hours," he repeated firmly.
"I'll be here."
"Dagny—"
"Yes?"
He chuckled softly. "No, nothing. Just wanted to hear your voice awhile longer. Forgive me. I mean, not
now. I mean, I don't want to say anything now."
"Hank, I—"
"When I see you, my darling. So long."
She stood looking at the silent receiver. For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain,
but it made her alive, because it was worth feeling.
She telephoned her secretary at Taggart Transcontinental, to say briefly that she would be in the office in
half an hour.
The statue of Nathaniel Taggart was real—when she stood facing it in the concourse of the Terminal. It
seemed to her that they were alone in a vast, echoing temple, with fog coils of formless ghosts weaving
and vanishing around them. She stood still, looking up at the statue, as for a brief moment of dedication.
I'm back—were the only words she had to offer.
"Dagny Taggart" was still the inscription on the frosted glass panel of the door to her office. The look on
the faces of her staff, as she entered the anteroom, was the look of drowning persons at the sight of a
lifeline. She saw Eddie Willers standing at his desk in his glass enclosure, with some man before him.
Eddie made a move in her direction, but stopped; he looked imprisoned. She let her glance greet every
face in turn, smiling at them gently as at doomed children, then walked toward Eddie's desk.
Eddie was watching her approach as if he were seeing nothing else in the world, but his rigid posture
seemed designed to pretend that he was listening to the man before him.
"Motive power?" the man was saying in a voice that had a brusque, staccato snap and a slurred, nasal
drawl, together. "There's no problem about motive power. You just take—"
"Hello," said Eddie softly, with a muted smile, as to a distant vision.
The man turned to glance at her. He had a yellow complexion, curly hair, a hard face made of soft
muscles, and the revolting handsomeness belonging to the esthetic standards of barroom corners; his