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lover.) When she didn’t respond to a printed invitation, Rand telephoned and made an appointment to see her at the Herald Tribune’s offices on West Forty-first Street. Paterson never joined organizations, she explained. But Rand impressed her. A couple of weeks later, Ann Watkins called to report that the older woman had been asking for Rand’s phone number, and they met again. Rand liked her “enormously.” Before long she was attending Paterson’s regular Monday-night get-togethers in a dingy eleventh-floor cubbyhole at the Tribune, where half a dozen literary and political essayists and pundits, including Time magazine’s Sam Welles and Fortune’s John Chamberlain, typically gathered to proofread the paper’s weekly books section before it went to press. Between sets of proofs, Paterson led discussions on subjects ranging from books and gardening to capitalist economics and the American Articles of Confederation. Participants thought of these sessions as a conservative Round Table, comparing themselves to an earlier group of literary wits led by Dorothy Parker, Heywood Broun, and Alexander Woollcott that met at the Algonquin Hotel, a few blocks north of the Herald Tribune.

Rand tended to behave with old-world formality among political and professional acquaintances, but when Paterson invited her to spend a weekend in her rural Ridgefield, Connecticut, country house, without O’Connor, Rand uncharacteristically accepted—remarking later, after the two women had fallen out, that it was rude of Paterson not to have included Frank. Both night owls, they talked nonstop until dawn about philosophy and politics. Paterson had grown up among pioneers in the Canadian West and was widely and deeply acquainted with American history and theories of free-market economics. Her guest was less broadly read, and was fascinated by Paterson’s views. Setting aside a hazy presentiment that Paterson might have a buried mystical streak (after all, who but a religious mystic would argue that suffering had an upside?), she was captivated and exhilarated by the older woman’s explanations of judicial process and the measures the Founding Fathers took to protect minority rights against the will of a potentially tyrannical majority. Paterson had a theory about capitalism, that it operates like an expanding circuit of energy whose generating plant, or dynamo, is the individual who produces what he is best at and trades with other individuals who do the same; money acts as a signaling system that allows people to transmit their desires around the world and expand the circuit. Much of what Rand learned from Paterson would find its way into the essays she was beginning to write, into the last two-thirds of The Fountainhead, and, in the use of energy circuits, motors, and power as metaphors for human action and achievement, into the structural motifs of Atlas Shrugged.

Rand later remarked that, at her best, Paterson exhibited a magnificent ability to make rapid-fire abstract associations, ferret out philosophical meanings, and, in contrast to almost everybody else, instantly understand what Rand was talking about. She had a “marvelous mind,” Rand said, and Paterson returned the compliment by declaring that her new acquaintance was a genius, a word she rarely used, according to her friend and executor, Muriel Welles Hall. Paterson became Rand’s closest friend since Olga Nabokov had abruptly left St. Petersburg and was her first and only living mentor. On scores of Monday nights, in phone calls, over dinner, and on many subsequent weekends in Connecticut (with O’Connor), Rand “sat at the master’s feet,” as Monday-evening habitué Sam Welles (Muriel’s brother) later recalled. Mimi, on her summer sojourns with Rand and O’Connor in New York, was often present during her aunt’s late-night conversations with Paterson. She recalled that the women would stay up talking until four or five o’clock in the morning. Rand asked the questions and Paterson answered them. It was as if the older woman were Rand’s “guru and teacher,” Mimi said, “and Ayn didn’t do that.”

Paterson