Atlas Shrugged

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rafters or at the steel plate of an air conditioning machine that whirred tensely, rhythmically above their
heads. She wore slacks or cotton summer dresses, yet she was never so feminine as when she stood
beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his
power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her. He taught her every
manner of sensuality he could invent. "Isn't it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?" he
said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the
conception that joy is sin.
They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was
immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal. She knew the general doctrine on sex,
held by people in one form or another, the doctrine that sex was an ugly weakness of man's lower nature,
to be condoned regretfully. She experienced an emotion of chastity that made her shrink, not from the
desires of her body, but from any contact with the minds who held this doctrine.
That winter, Francisco came to see her in New York, at unpredictable intervals. He would fly down
from Cleveland, without warning, twice a week, or he would vanish for months. She would sit on the
floor of her room, surrounded by charts and blueprints, she would hear a knock at her door and snap,
"I'm busy!" then hear a mocking voice ask, "Are you?" and leap to her feet to throw the door open, to
find him standing there. They would go to an apartment he had rented in the city, a small apartment in a
quiet neighborhood. "Francisco," she asked him once, in sudden astonishment, "I'm your mistress, am I
not?" He laughed. "That's what you are." She felt the pride a woman is supposed to experience at being
granted the title of wife.
In the many months of his absence, she never wondered whether he was true to her or not; she knew he
was. She knew, even though she was too young to know the reason, that indiscriminate desire and
unselective indulgence were possible only to those who regarded sex and themselves as evil.
She knew little about Francisco's life. It was his last year in college; he seldom spoke of it, and she never
questioned him. She suspected that he was working too hard, because she saw, at times, the unnaturally
bright look of his face, the look of exhilaration that comes from driving one's energy beyond its limit. She
laughed at him once, boasting that she was an old employee of Taggart Transcontinental, while he had
not started to work for a living. He said, "My father refuses to let me work for d'Anconia Copper until I
graduate." "When did you learn to be obedient?" "I must respect his wishes. He is the owner of
d'Anconia Copper. . . . He is not, however, the owner of all the copper companies in the world." There
was a hint of secret amusement in his smile.
She did not learn the story until the next fall, when he had graduated and returned to New York after a
visit to his father in Buenos Aires.
Then he told her that he had taken two courses of education during the last four years: one at the Patrick
Henry University, the other in a copper foundry on the outskirts of Cleveland. "I like to learn things for
myself," he said. He had started working at the foundry as furnace boy, when he was sixteen—and now,
at twenty, he owned it. He acquired his first title of property, with the aid of some inaccuracy about his
age, on the day when he received his university diploma, and he sent them both to his father.
He showed her a photograph of the foundry. It was a small, grimy place, disreputable with age, battered
by years of a losing struggle; above its entrance gate, like a new flag on the mast of a derelict, hung the
sign: d'Anconia Copper.
The public relations man of his father's office in New York had moaned, outraged, "But, Don Francisco,
you can't do that! What will the public think? That name on a dump of this kind?" "It's my name,"