Atlas Shrugged [245]
"Of course, I was running a risk," she said. "You might have been taking somebody out to dinner." He said nothing. "Or were you, perhaps, intending to return home tonight?"
"No."
"Did you have an engagement for this evening?"
"No."
"Fine." She pointed at her suitcase. "I brought my evening clothes.
Will you bet me a corsage of orchids that I can get dressed faster than you can?"
He thought that Dagny would be at her brother's wedding tonight; the evening did not matter to him any longer. "I'll take you out, if you wish," he said, "but not to that wedding."
"Oh, but that's where I want to go! It's the most preposterous event of the season, and everybody's been looking forward to it for weeks, all my friends. I wouldn't miss it for the world. There isn't any better show in town-nor better publicized. It's a perfectly ridiculous marriage, but just about what you'd expect from Jim Taggart."
She was moving casually through the room, glancing around, as if getting acquainted with an unfamiliar place. "I haven't been in New York for years," she said. "Not with you, that is. Not on any formal occasion."
He noticed the pause in the aimless wandering of her eyes, a glance that stopped briefly on a filled ashtray and moved on. He felt a stab of revulsion.
She saw it in his face and laughed gaily. "Oh but, darling, I'm not relieved! I'm disappointed. I did hope I'd find a few cigarette butts smeared with lipstick."
He gave her credit for the admission of the spying, even if under cover of a joke. But something in the stressed frankness of her manner made him wonder whether she was joking; for the flash of an instant, he felt that she had told him the truth. He dismissed the impression, because he could not conceive of it as possible.
"I'm afraid that you'll never be human," she said. "So I'm sure that I have no rival. And if I have-which I doubt, darling-I don't think I'll worry about it, because if it's a person who's always available on call, without appointment-well, everybody knows what sort of a person that is."
He thought that he would have to be careful; he had been about to slap her face. "Lillian, I think you know," he said, "that humor of this kind is more than I can stand."
"Oh, you're so serious!" she laughed. "I keep forgetting it. You're so serious about everything-particularly yourself."
Then she whirled to him suddenly, her smile gone. She had the strange, pleading look which he had seen in her face at times, a look that seemed made of sincerity and courage: "You prefer to be serious, Henry? All right. How long do you wish me to exist somewhere in the basement of your life? How lonely do you want me to become? I've asked nothing of you. I've let you live your life as you pleased. Can't you give me one evening? Oh, I know you hate parties and you'll be bored. But it means a great deal to me. Call it empty, social vanity-I want to appear, for once, with my husband. I suppose you never think of it in such terms, but you're an important man, you're envied, hated, respected and feared, you're a man whom any woman would be proud to show off as her husband.
You may say it's a low form of feminine ostentation, but that's the form of any woman's happiness. You don't live by such standards, but I do. Can't you give me this much, at the price of a few hours of boredom? Can't you be strong enough to fulfill your obligation and to perform a husband's duty? Can't you go there, not for your own sake, but mine, not because you want to go, but only because I want it?"
Dagny-he thought desperately-Dagny, who had never said a word about his life at home, who had never made a claim, uttered a reproach or asked a question-he could not appear before her with his wife, he could not let her see him as the husband being proudly shown off-he wished he could die now, in this moment, before he committed this action-because he knew that he would commit it.
Because he had accepted his secret as guilt and promised himself to take its consequences-because