Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [488]
It was the casual simplicity of his voice, the manner of taking her presence and their domestic routine for granted, as if it were of no significance to them, that gave her the sense of an underscored significance and the feeling that he knew it.
She answered as casually, “If you’ll bring me the cane I left in the car, I’ll have breakfast ready for you by the time you come back.”
He glanced at her with a slight astonishment; his eyes moved from her bandaged ankle to the short sleeves of the blouse that left her arms bare to display the heavy bandage on her elbow. But the transparent blouse, the open collar, the hair falling down to the shoulders that seemed innocently naked under a thin film of cloth, made her look like a schoolgirl, not an invalid, and her posture made the bandages look irrelevant. .
He smiled, not quite at her, but as if in amusement at some sudden memory of his own. “If you wish,” he said.
It was strange to be left alone in his house. Part of it was an emotion she had never experienced before: an awed respect that made her hesitantly conscious of her hands, as if to touch any object around her would be too great an intimacy. The other part was a reckless sense of ease, a sense of being at home in this place, as if she owned its owner.
It was strange to feel so pure a joy in the simple task of preparing a breakfast. The work seemed an end in itself, as if the motions of filling a coffee pot, squeezing oranges, slicing bread were performed for their own sake, for the sort of pleasure one expects, but seldom finds, in the motions of dancing. It startled her to realize that she had not experienced this kind of pleasure in her work since her days at the operator’s desk in Rockdale Station.
She was setting the table, when she saw the figure of a man hurrying up the path to the house, a swift, agile figure that leaped over boulders with the casual ease of a flight. He threw the door open, calling, “Hey, John!”—and stopped short as he saw her. He wore a dark blue sweater and slacks, he had gold hair and a face of such shocking perfection of beauty that she stood still, staring at him, not in admiration, at first, but in simple disbelief.
He looked at her as if he had not expected to find a woman in this house. Then she saw a look of recognition melting into a different kind of astonishment, part amusement, part triumph melting into a chuckle. “Oh, have you joined us?” he asked.
“No,” she answered dryly, “I haven’t. I’m a scab.”
He laughed, like an adult at a child who uses technological words beyond its understanding. “If you know what you’re saying, you know that it’s not possible,” he said. “Not here.”
“I crashed the gate. Literally.”
He looked at her bandages, weighing the question, his glance almost insolent in its open curiosity. “When?”
“Yesterday.”
“How?”
“In a plane.”
“What were you doing in a plane in this part of the country?”
He had the direct, imperious manner of an aristocrat or a roughneck; he looked like one and was dressed like the other. She considered him for a moment, deliberately letting him wait. “I was trying to land on a prehistorical mirage,” she answered. “And I have.”
“You are a scab,” he said, and chuckled, as if grasping all the implications of the problem. “Where’s John?”
“Mr. Galt is at the powerhouse. He should be back any moment.”
He sat down in an armchair, asking no permission, as if he were at home. She turned silently to her work. He sat watching her movements with an open grin, as if the sight of her laying out cutlery on a kitchen table were the spectacle of some special paradox.
“What did Francisco say when he saw you here?” he asked.
She turned to him with a slight jolt, but answered evenly, “He is not here yet.”
“Not yet?” He seemed startled. “Are you sure?”
“So I was told.”
He lighted a cigarette. She wondered, watching