Atlas Shrugged [238]
Dagny and his wish to see her were the only exception left to him.
The wish remained. But in a sudden shock, he realized that he felt no desire to sleep with her tonight. That desire-which had never given him a moment's rest, which had been growing, feeding on its own satisfaction-was wiped out. It was an odd impotence, neither of his mind nor of his body. He felt, as passionately as he had ever felt it, that she was the most desirable woman on earth; but what came from it was only a desire to desire her, a wish to feel, not a feeling. The sense of numbness seemed impersonal, as if its root were neither in him nor in her; as if it were the act of sex that now belonged to a realm which he had left.
"Don't get up-stay there-it's so obvious that you've been waiting for me that I want to look at it longer."
He said it, from the doorway of her apartment, seeing her stretched in an armchair, seeing the eager little jolt that threw her shoulders forward as she was about to rise; he was smiling.
He noted-as if some part of him were watching his reactions with detached curiosity-that his smile and his sudden sense of gaiety were real. He grasped a feeling that he had always experienced, but never identified because it had always been absolute and immediate: a feeling that forbade him ever to face her in pain. It was much more than the pride of wishing to conceal his suffering: it was the feeling that suffering must not be granted recognition in her presence, that no form of claim between them should ever be motivated by pain and aimed at pity. It was not pity that he brought here or came here to find.
"Do you still need proof that I'm always waiting for you?" she asked, leaning obediently back in her chair; her voice was neither tender nor pleading, but bright and mocking.
"Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?"
"Because they're never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am."
"I do admire self-confidence."
"Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank."
"What's the whole?"
"Confidence of my value-and yours." He glanced at her as if catching the spark of a sudden thought, and she laughed, adding, "I wouldn't be sure of holding a man like Orren Boyle, for instance. He wouldn't want me at all. You would."
"Are you saying," he asked slowly, "that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?"
"Of course."
"That's not the reaction of most people to being wanted."
"It isn't."
"Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.".
"I feel that others live up to me, if they want me. And that is the way you feel, too, Hank, about yourself-whether you admit it or not,"
That's not what I said to you then, on that first morning-he thought, looking down at her. She lay stretched out lazily, her face blank, but her eyes bright with amusement. He knew that she was thinking of it and that she knew he was. He smiled, but said nothing else.
As he sat half-stretched on the couch, watching her across the room, he felt at peace-as if some temporary wall had risen between him and the things he had felt on his way here. He told her about his encounter with the man from the State Science Institute, because, even though he knew that the event held danger, an odd, glowing sense of satisfaction still remained from it in his mind.
He chuckled at her look of indignation. "Don't bother being angry at them," he said. "It's no worse than all the rest of what they're doing every day."
"Hank, do you want me to speak to Dr. Stadler about it?"
"Certainly not!"
"He ought to stop it. He could at least do that much."
"I'd rather go to jail. Dr. Stadler? You're not having anything to do with him, are you?"
"1 saw him a few days ago."
"Why?"
"In regard to the motor."
"The motor . . . ?" He said it slowly, in a strange way, as if the thought of the motor had suddenly brought back to him a realm he had forgotten.