Atlas Shrugged

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 "No kidding?" she whispered.
"No kidding."
She whirled around and ran like a streak to the door of the employees1 quarters, forgetting her counter,
her duties and all feminine concern about never showing eagerness in accepting a man's invitation.
He stood looking after her for a moment, his eyes narrowed. He did not name to himself the nature of his
own feeling—never to identify his emotions was the only steadfast rule of his life; he merely felt it—and
this particular feeling was pleasurable, which was the only identification he cared to know. But the feeling
was the product of a thought he would not utter. He had often met girls of the lower classes, who had put
on a brash little act, pretending to look up to him, spilling crude flattery for an obvious purpose; he had
neither liked nor resented them; he had found a bored amusement in their company and he had granted
them the status of his equals in a game he considered natural to both players involved. This girl was
different. The unuttered words in his mind were: The damn little fool means it.
That he waited for her impatiently, when he stood in the rain on the sidewalk, that she was the one
person he needed tonight, did not disturb him or strike him as a contradiction. He did not name the nature
of his need. The unnamed and the unuttered could not clash into a contradiction.
When she came out, he noted the peculiar combination of her shyness and of her head held high. She
wore an ugly raincoat, made worse by a gob of cheap jewelry on the lapel, and a small hat of plush
flowers planted defiantly among her curls. Strangely, the lift of her head made the apparel seem attractive;
it stressed how well she wore even the things she wore.
"Want to come to my place and have a drink with me?" he asked.
She nodded silently, solemnly, as if not trusting herself to find the right words of acceptance. Then she
said, not looking at him, as if stating it to herself, "You didn't want to see anybody tonight, but you want o
see me. . . " He had never heard so solemn a tone of pride in anyone's voice.
She was silent, when she sat beside him in the taxicab. She looked up at the skyscrapers they passed.
After a while, she said, "I heard that things like this happened in New York, but I never thought they'd
happen to me."
"Where do you come from?"
"Buffalo."
"Got any family?"
She hesitated. "I guess so. In Buffalo."
"What do you mean, you guess so?"
"I walked out on them."
"Why?"
"I thought that if I ever was to amount to anything, I had to get away from them, clean away."