it, that it meant something special to you, something personal, and that was why you liked to hear me talk about it. But this—the thing I learned today—this has nothing to do with the railroad. It would be of no importance to you. Forget it.... It’s something that I didn’t know about her, that’s all. ... I grew up with her. I thought I knew her. I didn’t.... I don’t know what it was that I expected. I suppose I just thought that she had no private life of any kind. To me, she was not a person and not ... not a woman. She was the railroad. And I didn’t think that anyone would ever have the audacity to look at her in any other way. ... Well, it serves me right. Forget it.... Forget it, I said! Why do you question me like this? It’s only her private life. What can it matter to you? ... Drop it, for God’s sake! Don’t you see that I can’t talk about it? ... Nothing happened, nothing’s wrong with me, I just —oh, why am I lying? I can’t lie to you, you always seem to see everything, it’s worse than trying to lie to myself! ... I have lied to myself. I didn’t know what I felt for her. The railroad? I’m a rotten hypocrite. If the railroad was all she meant to me, it wouldn’t have hit me like this. I wouldn’t have felt that I wanted to kill him! ... What’s the matter with you tonight? Why do you look at me like that? ... Oh, what’s the matter with all of us? Why is there nothing but misery left for anyone? Why do we suffer so much? We weren’t meant to. I always thought that we were to be happy, all of us, as our natural fate. What are we doing? What have we lost? A year ago, I wouldn’t have damned her for finding something she wanted. But I know that they’re doomed, both of them, and so am I, and so is everybody, and she was all I had left.... It was so great, to be alive, it was such a wonderful chance, I didn’t know that I loved it and that that was our love, hers and mine and yours—but the world is perishing and we cannot stop it. Why are we destroying ourselves? Who will tell us the truth? Who will save us? Oh, who is John Galt?! ... No, it’s no use. It doesn’t matter now. Why should I feel anything? We won’t last much longer. Why should I care what she does? Why should I care that she’s sleeping with Hank Rearden? ... Oh God!—what’s the matter with you? Don’t go! Where are you going?”
CHAPTER X
THE SIGN OF THE DOLLAR
She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, not moving, wishing she would never have to move again.
The telegraph poles went racing past the window, but the train seemed lost in a void, between a brown stretch of prairie and a solid spread of rusty, graying clouds. The twilight was draining the sky without the wound of a sunset; it looked more like the fading of an anemic body in the process of exhausting its last drops of blood and light. The train was going west, as if it, too, were pulled to follow the sinking rays and quietly to vanish from the earth. She sat still, feeling no desire to resist it.
She wished she would not hear the sound of the wheels. They knocked in an even rhythm, every fourth knock accented—and it seemed to her that through the rapid, running clatter of some futile stampede to escape, the beat of the accented knocks was like the steps of an enemy moving toward some inexorable purpose.
She had never experienced it before, this sense of apprehension at the sight of a prairie, this feeling that the rail was only a fragile thread stretched across an enormous emptiness, like a worn nerve ready to break. She had never expected that she, who had felt as if she were the motive power aboard a train, would now sit wishing, like a child or a savage, that this train would move, that it would not stop, that it would get her there on time—wishing it, not like an act of will, but like a plea to a dark unknown.
She thought of what a difference one month had made. She had seen it in the faces of the men at the stations. The track workers, the switchmen, the yardmen, who had always greeted her, anywhere along the line, their cheerful grins boasting that they knew who she was—had now