Atlas Shrugged [632]
For the same purpose and motive, for the same satisfaction, as others weave complex systems of philosophy to destroy generations, of establish dictatorships to destroy a country, so she, possessing no weapons except femininity, had made it her goal to destroy one man.
Yours was the code of life-he remembered the voice of his lost young teacher-what, then, is theirs?
"I have something to tell you!" cried Lillian, with the sound of that impotent rage which wishes that words were brass knuckles. "You're so proud of yourself, aren't you? You're so proud of your name!
Rearden Steel, Rearden Metal, Rearden Wife! That's what I was, wasn't I? Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Henry Rearden!" The sounds she was making were now a string of cackling gasps, an unrecognizable corruption of laughter. "Well, I think you'd like to know that your wife's been laid by another man! I've been unfaithful to you, do you hear me? I've been unfaithful, not with some great, noble lover, but with the scummiest louse, with Jim Taggart! Three months ago! Before your divorce!
While I was your wife! While I was still your wife!"
He stood listening like a scientist studying a subject of no personal relevance whatever. There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, nonproperty, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another.
"I've been unfaithful to you! Don't you hear me, you stainless Puritan? I've slept with Jim Taggart, you incorruptible hero! Don't you hear me? . . . Don't you hear me? . . . Don't you . . . ?"
He was looking at her as he would have looked if a strange woman had approached him on the street with a personal confession-a look like the equivalent of the words: Why tell it to me?
Her voice trailed off. He had not known what the destruction of a person would be like; but he knew that he was seeing the destruction of Lillian. He saw it in the collapse of her face, in the sudden slackening of features, as if there were nothing to hold them together, in the eyes, blind, yet staring, staring inward, filled with that terror which no outer threat can equal. It was not the look of a person losing her mind, but the look of a mind seeing total defeat and, in the same instant, seeing, her own nature for the first time-the look of a person seeing that after years of preaching non-existence, she had achieved it.
He turned to go. His mother stopped him at the door, seizing his arm. With a look of stubborn bewilderment, with the last of her effort at self-deceit, she moaned in a voice of tearfully petulant reproach, "Are you really incapable of forgiveness?"
"No, Mother," he answered, "I'm not. I would have forgiven the past-if, today, you had urged me to quit and disappear."
There was a cold wind outside, tightening his overcoat about him like an embrace, there was the great, fresh sweep of country stretching at the foot of the hill, and the clear, receding sky of twilight. Like two sunsets ending the day, the red glow of the sun was a straight, still band in the west, and the breathing red band in the east was the glow of his mills.
The feel of the steering wheel under his hands and of the smooth highway streaming past, as he sped to New York, had an oddly bracing quality. It was a sense of extreme precision and of relaxation, together, a sense of action without strain, which seemed inexplicably youthful-until he realized that this was the way he had acted and had expected always to act, in his youth-and what he now felt was like the simple, astonished question: Why should one ever have to act in any other manner?
It seemed to