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also learned from Rand, although partisans of both women debate what and how much. In one early discussion, they were affably arguing about how far it is possible to extend the ethical limits of Rand’s philosophy of anti-altruism, or selfishness. Paterson asked the younger woman her opinion of a riddle she recalled from Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Imagine that you are in a castle tower with a newborn baby in your arms, Paterson proposed, and only one of you can escape alive. Would you save your own life or that of the baby? Rand shocked Paterson into momentary silence by declaring that she would most certainly let the baby die. How could you ethically do that? Paterson demanded. Don’t human beings have a moral obligation to care for the young? No, Rand answered. She held no such view, although she did concede that her analysis might be different if the baby were her own. When Paterson suggested that such an attitude could be considered depraved, Rand declared, Very well, then, I am depraved. For the time being, that ended the discussion. Later, Paterson brought it up again. What would you do if the baby were your own? Reflecting, Rand answered that she still would choose to save herself, on the premise that without an adult to feed and care for it, the baby would die anyway. Aha! replied Paterson, who evidently found this point of logic persuasive. Rand later claimed that by means of such instruction, she converted Paterson from an entrenched secular Christian ethic to a morality of anti-altruism. Paterson thanked Rand for the clarification of parental ethics but insisted that she had always believed in enlightened self-interest, and the preponderance of evidence is on her side.

If the women loved to debate, they also loved to laugh. They were both entertained by Rand’s occasional malapropisms in her adopted language. Once she lamented “an ungulfable bridge.” Another time she asked, “Will you write my autobiography? I can’t do myself justice.” Paterson adorned her columns with witty drawings of herself and friends or authors and once printed a sketch of Rand dashing across a street, hat ribbons flying, dragging behind her a man who looks a lot like O’Connor. “She is afraid of traffic,” Paterson observed in the adjacent text, “because she was hit by a taxi once; and the way she shows it is to stand a minute at the crossing, viewing the stream of vehicles with alarm, seize the hand of her escort with a gesture of feminine terror, and then march ahead across the street, hauling her protector after her.” Paterson was droll, and a shrewd judge of Rand’s character.

Oddly, post-Willkie, Rand was getting a lot of writing done, though not on The Fountainhead. She produced three interesting items. In late 1940 or early 1941, she composed a bad-tempered open letter to conservatives who she thought were sitting on their hands and whom she hoped to persuade to join the active campaign she and Pollock were waging. She called it “To All Innocent Fifth Columnists.” If conservatives didn’t take immediate steps to oppose Roosevelt’s war of socialist propaganda and halt his expansion of executive powers, she wrote, they, like Willkie, would be to blame for the coming totalitarian dictatorship of America. “Of such as you is the Kingdom of Hitler and Stalin,” she added. The letter was far too rancorous to be used as a recruiting tool and was put away in a drawer. She also wrote a play, Think Twice. And she composed her first extended work of philosophical nonfiction, “The Individualist Manifesto,” which she drafted as the organization’s in-house mission statement. With it, she wanted to do for free-market capitalism what The Communist Manifesto had done for Communism.

Rand later said that Think Twice was written in three weeks, during the month of January 1941. An earnest, well-plotted whodunnit of ideas, the play is set in the Connecticut country house of a world-class “altruist” during a Fourth of July weekend party. His guests, all current beneficiaries of his largesse, hate him for the unacknowledged power he wields over their lives. One