Atlas Shrugged [339]
"If you really understand what you're saying-yes."
"Do you think I'll let you get away with it?"
"Get away . . . ?" He was looking at her incredulously, in cold, astonished curiosity.
"That's why, at your trial-" She stopped.
"What about my trial?"
She was trembling. "You know, of course, that I won't allow this to continue."
"What does it have to do with my trial?"
"I won't permit you to have her. Not her. Anyone but her."
He let a moment pass, then asked evenly, "Why?"
"I won't permit it! You'll give it up!" He was looking at her without expression, but the steadiness of his eyes hit her as his most dangerous answer. "You'll give it up, you'll leave her, you'll never see her again!"
"Lillian, if you wish to discuss it, there's one thing you'd better understand; nothing on earth will make me give it up."
"But I demand it!"
"I told you that you could demand anything but that."
He saw the look of a peculiar panic growing in her eyes: it was not the look of understanding, but of a ferocious refusal to understand-as if she wanted to turn the violence of her emotion into a fog screen, as if she hoped, not that it would blind her to reality, but that her blindness would make reality cease to exist.
"But I have the right to demand it! I own your life! It's my property.
My property-by your own oath. You swore to serve my happiness, Not yours-mine! What have you done for me? You've given me nothing, you've sacrificed nothing, you've never been concerned with anything but yourself-your work, your mills, your talent, your mistress!
What about me? I hold first claim! I'm presenting it for collection!
You're the account I own!"
It was the look on his face that drove her up the rising steps of her voice, scream by scream, into terror. She was seeing, not anger or pain or guilt, but the one inviolate enemy: indifference.
"Have you thought of me?" she screamed, her voice breaking against his face. "Have you thought of what you're doing to me? You have no right to go on, if you know that you're putting me through hell every time you sleep with that woman! I can't stand it, I can't stand one moment of knowing it! Will you sacrifice me to your animal desire? Are you as vicious and selfish as that? Can you buy your pleasure at the price of my suffering? Can you have it, if this is what it does to me?"
Feeling nothing but the emptiness of wonder, he observed the thing which he had glimpsed briefly in the past and was now seeing in the full ugliness of its futility: the spectacle of pleas for pity delivered, in snarling hatred, as threats and as demands.
"Lillian," he said very quietly, "I would have it, even if it took your life."
She heard it. She heard more than he was ready to know and to hear in his own words. The shock, to him, was that she did not scream in answer, but that he saw her, instead, shrinking down into calm. "You have no right . . ." she said dully. It had the embarrassing helplessness of the words of a person who knows her own words to be meaningless.
"Whatever claim you may have on me," he said, "no human being can hold on another a claim demanding that he wipe himself out of existence."
"Does she mean as much as that to you?"
"Much more than that."
The look of thought was returning to her face, but in her face it had the quality of a look of cunning. She remained silent.
"Lillian, I'm glad that you know the truth. Now you can make a choice with full understanding. You may divorce me-or you may ask that we continue as we are. That is the only choice you have. It is all I can offer you. I think you know that I want you to divorce me. But I don't ask for sacrifices. I don't know what sort of comfort you can find in our marriage, but if you do, I won't ask you to give it up. I don't know why you should want to hold me now, I don't know what it is that I mean to you, I don't know what you're seeking, what form of happiness is yours or what you will obtain