Atlas Shrugged [272]
Don't do it in your own life."
Like a dim sound track under her words, he was hearing the words said to him by Lillian; he was seeing the distance between the two, the difference in what they sought from him and from life.
"Dagny, what do you think of my marriage?"
"I have no right to think of it."
"You must have wondered about it."
"I did . . . before I came to Ellis Wyatt's house. Not since."
"You've never asked me a question about it."
"And won't."
He was silent for a moment, then said, looking straight at her, underscoring his first rejection of the privacy she had always granted him, "There's one thing I want you to know: I have not touched her since . . . Ellis Wyatt's house."
"I'm glad."
"Did you think I could?"
"I've never permitted myself to wonder about that."
"Dagny, do you mean that if I had, you . . . you'd accept that, too?"
"Yes."
"You wouldn't hate it?"
"I'd hate it more than I can tell you. But if that were your choice, I would accept it. I want you, Hank."
He took her hand and raised it to his lips, she felt the moment's struggle in his body, in the sudden movement with which he came down, half-collapsing, and let his mouth cling to her shoulder. Then he pulled her forward, he pulled the length of her body in the pale blue nightgown to lie stretched across his knees, he held it with an unsmiling violence, as if in hatred for her words and as if they were the words he had most wanted to hear.
He bent his face down to hers and she heard the question that had come again and again in the nights of the year behind them, always torn out of him involuntarily, always as a sudden break that betrayed his constant, secret torture: "Who was your first man?"
She strained back, trying to draw away from him, but he held her.
"No, Hank," she said, her face hard.
The brief, taut movement of his lips was a smile. "I know that you won't answer it, but I won't stop asking-because that is what I'll never accept."
"Ask yourself why you won't accept it."
He answered, his hand moving slowly from her breasts to her knees, as if stressing his ownership and hating it, "Because . . . the things you've permitted me to do . . . I didn't think you could, not ever, not even for me . . . but to find that you did, and more: that you had permitted another man, had wanted him to, had-"
"Do you understand what you're saying? That you've never accepted my wanting you, either-you've never accepted that I should want you, just as I should have wanted him, once."
He said, his voice low, "That's true."
She tore herself away from him with a brusque, twisting movement, she stood up, but she stood looking down at him with a faint smile, and she said softly, "Do you know your only real guilt? With the greatest capacity for it, you've never learned to enjoy yourself. You've always rejected your own pleasure too easily. You've been willing to bear too much."
"He said that, too."
"Who?"
"Francisco d'Anconia."
He wondered why he had the impression that the name shocked her and that she answered an instant too late, "He said that to you?"
"We were talking about quite a different subject."
In a moment, she said calmly, "I saw you talking to him. Which one of you was insulting the other, this time?"
"We weren't. Dagny, what do you think of him?"
"I think that he's done it intentionally-that smash-up we're in for, tomorrow."
"I know he has. Still, what do you think of him as a person?"
"I don't know. I ought to think that he's the most depraved person I've ever met."
"You ought to? But you don't?"
"No. I can't quite make myself feel certain of it."
He smiled. "That's what's strange about him. I know that he's a liar, a loafer, a cheap playboy, the most viciously irresponsible waste of a human being I ever imagined possible. Yet, when I look at him, I feel that if ever there was a man to whom I would entrust my life, he's the one."
She gasped. "Hank, are you saying that you like him?"
"I'm saying that I didn't know what it meant,