Atlas Shrugged [498]
He shook his head. "No. You'll be allowed to attend the concerts, the plays or any form of presentation for your own enjoyment, but not my lectures or any other sale of ideas which you might carry out of this valley. Besides, my customers, or students, are only those who have a practical purpose in taking my course: Dwight Sanders, Lawrence Hammond, Dick McNamara, Owen Kellogg, a few others. I've added one beginner this year: Quentin Daniels."
"Really?" she said, almost with a touch of jealousy. "How can he afford anything that expensive?"
"On credit. I've given him a time-payment plan. He's worth it."
"Where do you lecture?"
"In the hangar, on Dwight Sanders' farm."
"And where do you work during the year?"
"In my laboratory."
She asked cautiously, "Where is your laboratory? Here, in the valley?"
He held her eyes for a moment, letting her see that his glance was amused and that he knew her purpose, then answered, "No."
"You've lived in the outside world for all of these twelve years?"
"Yes."
"Do you"-the thought seemed unbearable-"do you hold some such job as the others?"
"Oh yes." The amusement in his eyes seemed stressed by some special meaning.
"Don't tell me that you're a second assistant bookkeeper!"
"No, I'm not."
"Then what do you do?"
"I hold the kind of job that the world wishes me to hold."
"Where?"
He shook his head. "No, Miss Taggart. If you decide to leave the valley, this is one of the things that you are not to know."
He smiled again with that insolently personal quality which now seemed to say that he knew the threat contained in his answer and what it meant to her, then he rose from the table.
When he had gone, she felt as if the motion of time were an oppressive weight in the stillness of the house, like a stationary, half-solid mass slithering slowly into some faint elongation by a tempo that left her no measure to know whether minutes had passed or hours. She lay half-stretched in an armchair of the living room, crumpled by that heavy, indifferent lassitude which is not the will to laziness, but the frustration of the will to a secret violence that no lesser action can satisfy.
That special pleasure she had felt in watching him eat the food she had prepared-she thought, lying still, her eyes closed, her mind moving, like time, through some realm of veiled slowness-it had been the pleasure of knowing that she had provided him with a sensual enjoyment, that one form of his body's satisfaction had come from her.
. . . There is reason, she thought, why a woman would wish to cook for a man . . . oh, not as a duty, not as a chronic career, only as a rare and special rite in symbol of . . . but what have they made of it, the preachers of woman's duty? . . . The castrated performance of a sickening drudgery was held to be a woman's proper virtue-while that which gave it meaning and sanction was held as a shameful sin . . . the work of dealing with grease, steam and slimy peelings in a reeking kitchen was held to be a spiritual matter, an act of compliance with her moral duty-while the meeting of two bodies in a bedroom was held to be a physical indulgence, an act of surrender to an animal instinct, with no glory, meaning or pride of spirit to be claimed by the animals involved.
She leaped abruptly to her feet. She did not want to think of the outer world or of its moral code. But she knew that that was not the subject of her thoughts. And she did not want to think of the subject her mind was intent on pursuing, the subject to which it kept returning against her will, by some will of its own. . . .
She paced the room, hating the ugly, jerky, uncontrolled looseness of her movements-torn between the need to let her motion break the stillness, and the knowledge that this was not the form of break she wanted. She lighted cigarettes, for an instant's illusion of purposeful action-and discarded them within another instant, feeling the weary distaste of a substitute purpose. She looked at the room like a restless beggar, pleading with physical objects to give her a motive, wishing she could find