Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [276]
“You’re carrying so much,” he said, “and it’s I who make it harder for you . . .”
“No, Hank, you don’t and you know it.”
“I know that you have the strength not to let it hurt you, but it’s a strength I have no right to call upon. Yet I do, and I have no solution, no atonement to offer. I can only admit that I know it and that there’s no way I can ask you to forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
“I had no right to bring her into your presence.”
“It did not hurt me. Only . . .”
“Yes?”
“.... only seeing the way you suffered . . . was hard to see.”
“I don’t think that suffering makes up for anything, but whatever I felt, I didn’t suffer enough. If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s to speak of my own suffering—that should be no one’s concern but mine. But if you want to know, since you know it already—yes, it was hell for me. And I wish it were worse. At least, I’m not letting myself get away with it.”
He said it sternly, without emotion, as an impersonal verdict upon himself. She smiled, in amused sadness, she took his hand and pressed it to her lips, and shook her head in rejection of the verdict, holding her face hidden against his hand.
“What do you mean?” he asked softly.
“Nothing ...” Then she raised her head and said firmly, “Hank, I knew you were married. I knew what I was doing. I chose to do it. There’s nothing that you owe me, no duty that you have to consider.”
He shook his head slowly, in protest.
“Hank, I want nothing from you except what you wish to give me. Do you remember that you called me a trader once? I want you to come to me seeking nothing but your own enjoyment. So long as you wish to remain married, whatever your reason, I have no right to resent it. My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me—not by your suffering or mine. I don’t accept sacrifices and I don’t make them. If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse. If you asked me to give up the railroad, I’d leave you. If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud. You don’t do it in business, Hank. Don’t do it in your own life.”
Like a dim sound track under her words, he was hearing the words said to him by Lillian; he was seeing the distance between the two, the difference in what they sought from him and from life.
“Dagny, what do you think of my marriage?”
“I have no right to think of it.”
“You must have wondered about it.”
“I did . . . before I came to Ellis Wyatt’s house. Not since.”
“You’ve never asked me a question about it.”
“And won’t.”
He was silent for a moment, then said, looking straight at her, underscoring his first rejection of the privacy she had always granted him, “There’s one thing I want you to know: I have not touched her since . . . Ellis Wyatt’s house.”
“I’m glad.”
“Did you think I could?”
“I’ve never permitted myself to wonder about that.”
“Dagny, do you mean that if I had, you . . . you’d accept that, too?”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t hate it?”
“I’d hate it more than I can tell you. But if that were your choice, I would accept it. I want you, Hank.”
He took her hand and raised it to his lips, she felt the moment’s struggle in his body, in the sudden movement with which he came down, half-collapsing, and let his mouth cling to her shoulder. Then he pulled her forward, he pulled the length of her body in the pale blue nightgown to lie stretched across his knees, he held it with an unsmiling violence, as if in hatred for her words and as if they were the words he had