Atlas Shrugged [236]
He looked at the dim, sculptured beauty of the room and at the people who sat at the tables. They sat in a manner of self-conscious display, as if the enormous cost of their clothes and the enormous care of their grooming should have fused into splendor, but didn't. Their faces had a look of rancorous anxiety.
"Dagny, look at those people. They're supposed to be the playboys of life, the amusement-seekers and luxury-lovers. They sit there, waiting for this place to give them meaning, not the other way around.
But they're always shown to us as the enjoyers of material pleasures -and then we're taught that enjoyment of material pleasures is evil.
Enjoyment? Are they enjoying it? Isn't there some sort of perversion in what we're taught, some error that's vicious and very important?"
"Yes, Hank-very vicious and very, very important."
"They are the playboys, while we're just tradesmen, you and I. Do you realize that we're much more capable of enjoying this place than they can ever hope to be?"
"Yes."
He said slowly, in the tone of a quotation, "Why have we left it all to fools? It should have been ours." She looked at him, startled. He smiled. "I remember every word you said to me at that party. I didn't answer you then, because the only answer I had, the only thing your words meant to me, was an answer that you would hate me for, I thought; it was that I wanted you." He looked at her. "Dagny, you didn't intend it then, but what you were saying was that you wanted to sleep with me, wasn't it?"
"Yes, Hank. Of course."
He held her eyes, then looked away. They were silent for a long time. He glanced at the soft twilight around them, then at the sparkle of two wine glasses on their table. "Dagny, in my youth, when I was working in the ore mines in Minnesota, I thought that I wanted to reach an evening like this. No, that was not what I was working for, and I didn't think of it often. But once in a while, on a winter night, when the stars were out and it was very cold, when I was tired, because I had worked two shifts, and wanted nothing on earth except to lie down and fall asleep right there, on the mine ledge-I thought that some day I would sit in a place like this, where one drink of wine would cost more than my day's wages, and I would have earned the price of every minute of it and of every drop and of every flower on the table, and I would sit there for no purpose but my own amusement."
She asked, smiling, "With your mistress?"
She saw the shot of pain in his eyes and wished desperately that she had not said it.
"With . . . a woman," he answered. She knew the word he had not pronounced. He went on, his voice soft and steady: "When I became rich and saw what the rich did for their amusement, I thought that the place I had imagined, did not exist. I had not even imagined it too clearly. I did not know what it would be like, only what I would feel. I gave up expecting it years ago. But I feel it tonight."
He raised his glass, looking at her.
"Hank, I . . . I'd give up anything I've ever had in my life, except my being a . . . a luxury object of your amusement."
He saw her hand trembling as she held her glass. He said evenly, "I know it, dearest."
She sat shocked and still: he had never used that word before. He threw his head back and smiled the most brilliantly gay smile she had ever seen on his face.
"Your first moment of weakness, Dagny," he said.
She laughed and shook her head. He stretched his arm across the table and closed his hand over her naked shoulder, as if giving her an instant's support. Laughing softly, and as if by accident, she let her mouth brush against his fingers; it kept her face down for the one moment when he could have seen that the brilliance of her eyes was tears.
When she looked up at him, her smile matched his-and the rest of the evening was their celebration-for all his years since the nights on the mine ledges-for all her years since the night of her first ball when, in desolate longing for an