Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [243]
“Do you still need proof that I’m always waiting for you?” she asked, leaning obediently back in her chair; her voice was neither tender nor pleading, but bright and mocking.
“Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?”
“Because they’re never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am.”
“I do admire self-confidence.”
“Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank.”
“What’s the whole?”
“Confidence of my value—and yours.” He glanced at her as if catching the spark of a sudden thought, and she laughed, adding, “I wouldn’t be sure of holding a man like Orren Boyle, for instance. He wouldn’t want me at all. You would.”
“Are you saying,” he asked slowly, “that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?”
“Of course.”
“That’s not the reaction of most people to being wanted.”
“It isn’t.”
“Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.”
“I feel that others live up to me, if they want me. And that is the way you feel, too, Hank, about yourself—whether you admit it or not.”
That’s not what I said to you then, on that first morning—he thought, looking down at her. She lay stretched out lazily, her face blank, but her eyes bright with amusement. He knew that she was thinking of it and that she knew he was. He smiled, but said nothing else.
As he sat half-stretched on the couch, watching her across the room, he felt at peace-as if some temporary wall had risen between him and the things he had felt on his way here. He told her about his encounter with the man from the State Science Institute, because, even though he knew that the event held danger, an odd, glowing sense of satisfaction still remained from it in his mind.
He chuckled at her look of indignation. “Don’t bother being angry at them,” he said. “It’s no worse than all the rest of what they’re doing every day.”
“Hank, do you want me to speak to Dr. Stadler about it?”
“Certainly not!”
“He ought to stop it. He could at least do that much.”
“I’d rather go to jail. Dr. Stadler? You’re not having anything to do with him, are you?”
“I saw him a few days ago.”
“Why?”
“In regard to the motor.”
“The motor ... ?” He said it slowly, in a strange way, as if the thought of the motor had suddenly brought back to him a realm he had forgotten. “Dagny ... the man who invented that motor ... he did exist, didn’t he?”
“Why . . . of course. What do you mean?”
“I mean only that ... that it’s a pleasant thought, isn’t it? Even if he’s dead now, he was alive once . . . so alive that he designed that motor....”
“What’s the matter, Hank?”
“Nothing. Tell me about the motor.”
She told him about her meeting with Dr. Stadler. She got up and paced the room, while speaking; she could not lie still, she always felt a surge of hope and of eagerness for action when she dealt with the subject of the motor.
The first thing he noticed were the lights of the city beyond the window: he felt as if they were being turned on, one by one, forming the great skyline he loved; he felt it, even though he knew that the lights had been there all the time. Then he understood that the thing which was returning was within him: the shape coming back drop by drop was his love for the city. Then he knew that it had come back because he was looking at the city past the taut, slender figure of a woman whose head was lifted eagerly as at a sight of distance, whose steps were a restless substitute for flight. He was looking at her as at a stranger, he was barely aware that she was a woman, but the sight was flowing into a feeling the words for which were: This is the world and the core of it, this is what made the city—they go together, the angular shapes of the buildings and the