Atlas Shrugged [170]
They looked, as if you stood on a mountain peak and they could only take their hats off to you across the great distance. Didn't they?"
"Yes," she whispered.
"They looked as if they knew that one may not approach you or speak in your presence or touch a fold of your dress. They knew it and it's true. They looked at you with respect, didn't they? They looked up to you?"
He seized her arm, threw her down on her knees, twisting her body against his legs, and bent down to kiss her mouth. She laughed soundlessly, her laughter mocking, but her eyes half-closed, veiled with pleasure.
Hours later, when they lay in bed together, his hand moving over her body, he asked suddenly, throwing her back against the curve of his arm, bending over her-and she knew, by the intensity of his face, by the sound of a gasp somewhere in the quality of his voice, even though his voice was low and steady, that the question broke out of him as if it were worn by the hours of torture he had spent with it: "Who were the other men that had you?"
He looked at her as if the question were a sight visualized in every detail, a sight he loathed, but would not abandon; she heard the contempt in his voice, the hatred, the suffering-and an odd eagerness that did not pertain to torture; he had asked the question, holding her body tight against him.
She answered evenly, but he saw a dangerous flicker in her eyes, as of a warning that she understood him too well. "There was only one other, Hank."
"When?"
"When I was seventeen.'1
"Did it last?"
"For some years."
"Who was he?"
She drew back, lying against his arm; he leaned closer, his face taut; she held his eyes. "I won't answer you."
"Did you love him?"
"I won't answer."
"Did you like sleeping with him?"
"Yes!"
The laughter in her eyes made it sound like a slap across his face, the laughter of her knowledge that this was the answer he dreaded and wanted.
He twisted her arms behind her, holding her helpless, her breasts pressed against him; she felt the pain ripping through her shoulders, she heard the anger in his words and the huskiness of pleasure in his voice: "Who was he?"
She did not answer, she looked at him, her eyes dark and oddly brilliant, and he saw that the shape of her mouth, distorted by pain, was the shape of a mocking smile.
He felt it change to a shape of surrender, under the touch of his lips.
He held her body as if the violence and the despair of the way he took her could wipe his unknown rival out of existence, out of her past, and more: as if it could transform any part of her, even the rival, into an instrument of his pleasure. He knew, by the eagerness of her movement as her arms seized him, that this was the way she wanted to be taken.
* * *
The silhouette of a conveyor belt moved against the strips of fire in the sky, raising coal to the top of a distant tower, as if an inexhaustible number of small black buckets rode out of the earth in a diagonal line across the sunset. The harsh, distant clatter kept going through the rattle of the chains which a young man in blue overalls was fastening over the machinery, securing it to the flatcars lined on the siding of the Quinn Ball Bearing Company of Connecticut.
Mr. Mowen, of the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company across the street, stood by, watching. He had stopped to watch, on his way home from his own plant. He wore a light overcoat stretched over his short, paunchy figure, and a derby hat over his graying, blondish head.
There was a first touch of September chill in the air. All the gates of the Quinn plant buildings stood wide open, while men and cranes moved the machinery out; like taking the vital organs and leaving a carcass, thought Mr. Mowen.
"Another one?" asked Mr. Mowen, jerking his thumb at the plant, even though he knew the answer.
"Huh?" asked the young man, who had not noticed him standing there.
"Another company moving to Colorado?"
"Uh-huh."
"It's the third one from Connecticut in the last two weeks," said Mr.
Mowen. "And when you look at what's happening