Atlas Shrugged [583]
He saw the sudden, startling sight of a look of hard, unclouded, unfeeling, almost inhuman intelligence in her eyes. "Jim, if I were the kind who did or would, you wouldn't have married me."
"No. I wouldn't have."
"Why did you marry me?"
He felt himself drawn as by a whirlpool, part in relief that the moment of danger was past, part in irresistible defiance of the same danger. "Because you were a cheap, helpless, preposterous little guttersnipe, who'd never have a chance at anything to equal me! Because I thought you'd love me! I thought you'd know that you had to love me!"
"As you are?"
"Without daring to ask what I am! Without reasons! Without putting me on the spot always to live up to reason after reason after reason, like being on some goddamn dress parade to the end of my days!"
"You loved me . . . because I was worthless?"
"Well, what did you think you were?"
"You loved me for being rotten?"
"What else did you have to offer? But you didn't have the humility to appreciate it. I wanted to be generous, I wanted to give you security-what security is there in being loved for one's virtues? The competition's wide open, like a jungle market place, a better person will always come along to beat you! But I-I was willing to love you for your flaws, for your faults and weaknesses, for your ignorance, your crudeness, your vulgarity-and that's safe, you'd have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, you could be yourself, your real, stinking, sinful, ugly self-everybody's self is a gutter-but you could hold my love, with nothing demanded of you!"
"You wanted me to . . . accept your love . . . as alms'"'
"Did you imagine that you could earn it? Did you imagine that you could deserve to marry me, you poor little tramp? I used to buy the likes of you for the price of a meal! I wanted you to know, with every step you took, with every mouthful of caviar you swallowed, that you owed it all to me, that you had nothing and were nothing and could never hope to equal, deserve or repay!"
"I . . . tried . . . to deserve it."
"Of what use would you be to me, if you had?"
"You didn't want me to?"
"Oh, you goddamn fool!"
"You didn't want me to improve? You didn't want me to rise? You thought me rotten and you wanted me to stay rotten?"
"Of what use would you be to me, if you earned it all, and I had to work to hold you, and you could trade elsewhere if you chose?"
"You wanted it to be alms . . . for both of us and from both?
You wanted us to be two beggars chained to each other?"
"Yes, you goddamn evangelist! Yes, you goddamn hero worshipper!
Yes!"
"You chose me because I was worthless?"
"Yes!"
"You're lying, Jim."
His answer was only a startled glance of astonishment.
"Those girls that you used to buy for the price of a meal, they would have been glad to let their real selves become a gutter, they would have taken your alms and never tried to rise, but you would not marry one of them. You married me, because you knew that I did not accept the gutter, inside or out, that I was struggling to rise and would go on struggling-didn't you?"
"Yes!" he cried.
Then the headlight she had felt rushing upon her, hit its goal-and she screamed in the bright explosion of the impact-she screamed in physical terror, backing away from him.
"What's the matter with you?" he cried, shaking, not daring to see in her eyes the thing she had seen.
She moved her hands in groping gestures, half-waving it away, half trying to grasp it; when she answered, her words did not quite name it, but they were the only words she could find: "You . . . you're a killer . . . for the sake of killing . . ."
It was too close to the unnamed; shaking with terror, he swung