Atlas Shrugged [246]
-he said evenly, his voice lifeless and firm: "All right, Lillian. I'll go."
The wedding veil of rose-point lace caught on the splintered floor of her tenement bedroom. Cherryl Brooks lifted it cautiously, stepping to look at herself in a crooked mirror that hung on the wall. She had been photographed here all day, as she had been many times in the past two months. She still smiled with incredulous gratitude when newspaper people wanted to take her picture, but she wished they would not do it so often.
An aging sob sister, who had a drippy love column in print and the bitter wisdom of a policewoman in person, had taken Cherryl under her protection weeks ago, when the girl had first been thrown into press interviews as into a meat grinder. Today, the sob sister had chased the reporters out, had snapped, "All right, all right, beat it!" at the neighbors, had slammed Cherryl's door in their faces and had helped her to dress. She was to drive Cherryl to the wedding; she had discovered that there was no one else to do it.
The wedding veil, the white satin gown, the delicate slippers and the strand of pearls at her throat, had cost five hundred times the price of the entire contents of Cherryl's room. A bed took most of the room's space, and the rest was taken by a chest of drawers, one chair, and her few dresses hanging behind a faded curtain. The huge hoop skirt of the wedding gown brushed against the walls when she moved, her slender figure swaying above the skirt in the dramatic contrast of a tight, severe, long-sleeved bodice; the gown had been made by the best designer in the city.
"You see, when I got the job in the dime store, I could have moved to a better room," she said to the sob sister, in apology, "but I don't think it matters much where you sleep at night, so I saved my money, because I'll need it for something important in the future-"
She stopped and smiled, shaking her head dazedly. "I thought I'd need it," she said.
"You look fine," said the sob sister. "You can't see much in that alleged mirror, but you're okay."
"The way all this happened, I . . . I haven't had time to catch up with myself. But you see, Jim is wonderful. He doesn't mind it, that I'm only a salesgirl from a dime store, living in a place like this. He doesn't hold it against me."
"Uh-huh," said the sob sister; her face looked grim.
Cherryl remembered the wonder of the first time Jim Taggart had come here. He had come one evening, without warning, a month after their first meeting, when she had given up hope of ever seeing him again. She had been miserably embarrassed, she had felt as if she were trying to hold a sunrise within the space of a mud puddle-but Jim had smiled, sitting on her only chair, looking at her flushed face and at her room. Then he had told her to put on her coat, and he had taken her to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in the city.
He had smiled at her uncertainty, at her awkwardness, at her terror of picking the wrong fork, and at the look of enchantment in her eyes.
She had not known what he thought. But he had known that she was stunned, not by the place, but by his bringing her there, that she barely touched the costly food, that she took the dinner, not as booty from a rich sucker-as all the girls he knew would have taken it-but as some shining award she had never expected to deserve.
He had come back to her two weeks later, and then their dates had grown progressively more frequent. He would drive up to the dime store at the closing hour, and she would see her fellow salesgirls gaping at her, at his limousine, at the uniformed chauffeur who opened the door for her. He would take her to the best night clubs, and