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By Root 907 0

nearby, your poke doesn’t bother him in the least. Far from falling down, he puts both hands in his pockets, deep into his pockets, shrugs his shoulders and assumes an air as if to say, ‘So what?’ That’s how little he was bothered by that poke you gave him. ‘So what!’ you reply furiously, giving him another poke in the pit of his stomach. At this moment you experience the following: after the last poke the man begins to evaporate; you watch, with your own eyes, as he’s gradually blotted out, becoming more and more blurred, until at last there is nothing left of him but his stomach, whereupon that too disappears. But all along he kept his hands in his pockets, looking at you with that same defiant expression, which seemed to say, ‘So what?’ ”

Again Dagny laughed. “Oh, what quaint adventures you have! Well, so what? What happens afterward, in the end?”

“Why, when you sit down at the table again to get on with your plans, you discover that you’ve cracked your knuckles on the fire wall.... But this is what I wanted to say: Tell your acquaintances about it the next day and they’ll know what to say. ‘You were asleep,’ they’ll say. Heh-heh-heh, oh sure, you were asleep, although God and all his angels know that you were not asleep. It’s simply crude and sophomoric to call it sleep when, in fact, you were standing by the stove wide-awake, smoking a pipe while talking to a man. Then comes the physician. He’s an excellent physician, representing science with pinched lips and superciliousness. ‘That,’ he says, ‘that’s nothing but nerves,’ he says. Oh God, what a farce! Sure is. ‘This, you know, is a clear case of nerves,’ he says. To the physician’s brain, it’s a thing of such and such dimensions, so many inches high and so many inches wide, something you can take in your fist—a good, thick case of nerves. And so he notes down iron and quinine on a slip of paper and cures you right off. That’s the way it’s done! But what a squarehead, what peasant logic—to intrude with his dimensions and his quinine in an area where not even the finest and wisest minds have been able to come up with an explanation.”1

“You’re losing a button,” she said.

“I’m losing a button?”

With a smile, she pointed at one of the buttons in his jacket, hanging precariously by a thread.

“Why not remove it altogether? It’ll come off fairly soon.”2

Humoring her, he pulled a knife out of his pocket and snipped the button off. As he took the knife out, some change and a medal on a sadly abused ribbon fell out of his pocket. He quickly bent down and picked up the articles as she stood watching. Then she said, “A medal, is it? But how can you treat it like that, look at the ribbon! What sort of medal is it?”

“It’s a lifesaving medal.... Well, don’t get the idea that it was in my pocket due to any merit on my part. It’s just humbug.”

She looked at him. His face was perfectly calm, his eyes candid, as if lying never entered his head. She was holding the medal in her hand.

“Starting again, aren’t you?3 If you didn’t earn it, how come you hang on to a thing like that, even wear it maybe?”

“I bought it!” he cried, laughing. “It’s mine, my property, I own it, just as I own my penknife, my jacket button. So why should I throw it away?”

“But how could you buy a medal?” she said.

“Sure, it’s humbug, I don’t deny it; ah, the sort of things one does oftentimes! On one occasion I wore it on my breast for a whole day, showing it off; I was even toasted for it, heh-heh-heh. One kind of humbug is as good as any other, don’t you think?”

“The name is scratched out,” she said.

His expression suddenly changed as he put out his hand for the medal.

“Is the name scratched out? That isn’t possible, let me see. It has only suffered from lying in my pocket. I’ve had it there together with my coins, that’s all.”

Dagny gave him a suspicious look. Then he snaps his fingers of a sudden and exclaims, “How thoughtless I can be! The name is scratched out, you’re right, how could I have forgotten it! Heh-heh-heh, I scratched it out myself, quite so. It wasn’t my name, after all, that was