wind burned his face excruciatingly. As he struggles along in the fierce cold, a half-naked woman comes rushing out of one of the cabins and starts running after him, all the while screaming, ‘There is a blister on your nose! Watch out, you’ve got a blister on your nose!’ The woman had a ladle in her hand and her sleeves were rolled up. She had seen this stranger go by with a cold blister on his nose and had run away from her chores to warn him about it. Heh-heh, would you believe it! And there she stands herself in the biting wind, her sleeves rolled up, while her whole right cheek is gradually losing color and turning into one huge blister! Heh-heh, it’s quite incredible! ... But despite this incident, and many other instances of feminine sacrifice he was familiar with, the stammerer was adamant on the subject. ‘Women are queer, insatiable creatures,’ he told me, without explaining exactly why they were queer and insatiable. ‘It’s quite unbelievable what fancies they can come up with,’ he said. And he related: ‘I had a friend who fell in love with a young lady; as a matter of fact, her name was Klara. He took great pains to win this lady, but it was no use; Klara wouldn’t have anything to do with him, though he was a handsome and well-regarded young man. However, Klara had a sister, an unusually lopsided and hunch-backed creature who was downright ugly. One day my friend proposes to her, God knows why; maybe he did it from ulterior motives, or maybe he had really fallen in love with her despite her ugliness. And what does Klara do? Well, here the female promptly showed her claws: Klara raises an outcry, kicking up a hell of a row: “It was me he wanted! It was me he wanted!” she said. “He won’t get me, though, I don’t want to, not for anything in the world,” she said. Hm, but do you think he was allowed to get the sister, with whom he had, in fact, fallen deeply in love? No, that’s just the catch—Klara wouldn’t let her sister have him either. Heh-heh-heh. Oh no! Since it was really herself he had wanted, he wouldn’t get her hunchbacked sister either, though she was none too good for anyone. And so my friend didn’t get either lady.’ ... This was one of the many stories the stammerer told me. He was such an amusing raconteur, just because he stammered so badly. However, the man was a great enigma.... Am I boring you?”
“No,” Dagny replied.
“A great enigma of a man, yes. He was such a miser, and a thief to boot, that he was capable of removing the leather straps from the railcar windows and taking them home with him, hoping to find some use for them. What was to stop him? As a matter of fact, he’s said to have been caught in such a theft once. On the other hand, he didn’t care a fig about money, when he was in that humor. One day he took it into his head to organize a prodigious drive. Since he didn’t have any friends, he hired twenty-four carriages for himself alone, which he dispatched one by one. Twenty-three of them were completely empty, and in the twenty-fourth—the last one—there he sits himself, looking down on the passersby, proud as a god of the huge procession he had pulled off....”
But Nagel dreamed up one subject after another without any success; Dagny was barely listening to what he said. He fell silent, considering for a moment. Why the hell did he have to talk so stupidly, making a fool of himself all the time! To assault a young lady, the queen of his heart at that, with idle talk about cold blisters and twenty-four carriages! Suddenly he remembered that he had also forgotten himself badly once before, telling a stale joke about an Eskimo and a letter case. His cheeks flushed at the recollection; he gave a start and almost came to a stop. Why the hell didn’t he watch out! Oh, he ought to be ashamed of himself! These moments when he jabbered away so stupidly made him look ridiculous; they humiliated him and set him back weeks and months. What mustn’t she think of him!
“So when will that bazaar take place?” he said.
She answered, smiling, “Why are you taking such pains to talk all the time? Why are you all