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threaten you,” she assured them. “There’s nothing that alters my love for my husband, or Nathan’s love for his wife. It’s something separate, apart from our normal lives.” Barbara sat, frozen, not surprised by what she heard but stunned into silence nonetheless. As Rand talked, Frank turned pale and looked downcast. “We’re not Platonists,” she continued. “We don’t hold our values in some other realm, unrelated to the realm in which we live our lives. If we mean the values we profess, how can [Nathan and I] not be in love?” She talked for a long time. Once—so Barbara reported—the young wife jumped to her feet and shouted, “No! I won’t be part of this!” at which point, she recalled, Frank also raised his voice, saying, “And I won’t be part of it.” Rand remained calm. They weren’t proposing a sexual union, she explained. The twenty-five-year age difference ruled that out. No, they wanted only to spend a little time together. Wasn’t that a reasonable request? Thirty years later, Barbara told an interviewer, while trying to explain her agreement to such a request, “With Ayn’s mind, once you accepted her premises she’d spin out a deductive chain from which you just couldn’t escape.” Ensorcelled by the older woman’s authority and theories of love and value, Barbara assented. So did O’Connor.

Two months later, in November, the curtain rose on the second act of the affair. The philosopher and her protégé could not stick to their original agreement to abstain from sex, they informed Frank and Barbara. They defended the rightness and rationality of a full-throttle sexual affair in a series of conversations with their spouses that went on for weeks. Each was the embodiment of the other’s highest values, they pointed out in the language of Atlas Shrugged, and because neither suffered from an irrational mind-body split, they naturally felt sexual longing for each other. Surely Frank and Barbara, both of whom subscribed to Rand’s value theory of sexuality, could understand and accept this new development. In making her case, Rand invoked her years of deprivation. “You both know how little I’ve had in my life, by way of personal reward,” she told them. “This is the very last period in my life when I can think about or permit myself” the pleasure of a passionate sexual affair outside of marriage. “I’m a realist about age,” she added. “What we’re asking for is temporary…. Just to have had it for a little while.”

A month before her fiftieth birthday, she and Nathaniel received their partners’ permission to meet for sex twice a week. Barbara, to whom Rand had shown both personal kindness and an example of “the epitome and standard of the human potential,” acted on a mixture of gratitude to the writer and guilt over her inability to respond sexually to her husband. Why O’Connor went along with the scheme is not known, but speculation among Rand aficionados divides in two camps. Some, including the Brandens, surmise that he was so devoted to his wife’s well-being, including her sexual well-being, and so conscious of his limitations that he quietly waived his marital rights. Others contend that Frank, who knew and approved of his wife’s fantasies of sexual triangles in her novels, also approved of the affair. As evidence, they cite passages such as this one from her 1949 notes for Atlas, written six months before she met Branden: “[Hank Rearden] takes pleasure in Dagny’s greatness,” she wrote, and this “arouses his sexual desire; he [also] takes pleasure in the thought of Dagny and another man, which is an unconscious acknowledgement that sex, as such, is great and beautiful, not evil and degrading.” A few pages later, she continued, “On the right philosophical premise about sex, my premise … a husband would feel honored if another man wanted his wife; he would not let the other man have her—his exclusive possession [of her] is the material form of her love for him—but he would feel that the other man’s desire was a natural and proper expression of the man’s admiration for his wife, for the values which she represents and which he saw in her.