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to catch the coming morning before it came. And then she saw him walking alone

on the path before her.

She tore ahead. She caught up with him and stopped sharply, the jolt throwing

her forward then back like the release of a spring. He stopped.

They said nothing. They looked at each other. She thought that every silent

instant passing was a betrayal; this wordless encounter was too eloquent, this

recognition that no greeting was necessary.

She asked, her voice flat:

"Why didn’t you come to set the marble?"

"I didn’t think it would make any difference to you who came. Or did it, Miss

Francon?"

She felt the words not as sounds, but as a blow flat against her mouth. The

branch she held went up and slashed across his face. She started off in the

sweep of the same motion.

#

Dominique sat at the dressing table in her bedroom. It was very late. There was

no sound in the vast, empty house around her. The french windows of the bedroom

were open on a terrace and there was no sound of leaves in the dark garden

beyond.

The blankets on her bed were turned down, waiting for her, the pillow white

against the tall, black windows. She thought she would try to sleep. She had not

seen him for three days. She ran her hands over her head, the curves of her

palms pressing against the smooth planes of hair. She pressed her fingertips,

wet with perfume, to the hollows of her temples, and held them there for a

moment; she felt relief in the cold, contracting bite of the liquid on her skin.

A spilled drop of perfume remained on the glass of the dressing table, a drop

sparkling like a gem and as expensive.

She did not hear the sound of steps in the garden. She heard them only when they

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rose up the stairs to the terrace. She sat up, frowning. She looked at the

french windows.

He came in. He wore his work clothes, the dirty shirt with rolled sleeves, the

trousers smeared with stone dust. He stood looking at her. There was no laughing

understanding in his face. His face was drawn, austere in cruelty, ascetic in

passion, the cheeks sunken, the lips pulled down, set tight. She jumped to her

feet, she stood, her arms thrown back, her fingers spread apart. He did not

move. She saw a vein of his neck rise, beating, and fall down again.

Then he walked to her. He held her as if his flesh had cut through hers and she

felt the bones of his arms on the bones of her ribs, her legs jerked tight

against his, his mouth on hers.

She did not know whether the jolt of terror shook her first and she thrust her

elbows at his throat, twisting her body to escape, or whether she lay still in

his arms, in the first instant, in the shock of feeling his skin against hers,

the thing she had thought about, had expected, had never known to be like this,

could not have known, because this was not part of living, but a thing one could

not bear longer than a second.

She tried to tear herself away from him. The effort broke against his arms that

had not felt it. Her fists beat against his shoulders, against his face. He

moved one hand, took her two wrists, pinned them behind her, under his arm,

wrenching her shoulder blades. She twisted her head back. She felt his lips on

her breast. She tore herself free.

She fell back against the dressing table, she stood crouching, her hands

clasping the edge behind her, her eyes wide, colorless, shapeless in terror. He

was laughing. There was the movement of laughter on his face, but no sound.

Perhaps he had released her intentionally. He stood, his legs apart, his arms

hanging at his sides, letting her be more sharply aware of his body across the

space between them than she had been in his arms. She looked at the door behind

him, he saw the first hint of movement, no more than a thought of leaping toward

that door. He extended his arm, not touching her, and fell back. Her shoulders

moved faintly, rising. He took a step forward and her shoulders fell. She

huddled lower, closer to the table. He let her wait. Then he approached. He

lifted her without effort. She let her teeth sink into his hand and felt blood

on the tip of her tongue. He pulled her head back and he forced her mouth open

against his.

She fought like an animal. But she made no sound. She did not call for help. She

heard the echoes of her blows in a gasp of his breath, and she knew that it was

a gasp of pleasure. She reached for the lamp on the dressing table. He knocked

the lamp out of her hand. The crystal burst to pieces in the darkness.

He had thrown her down on the bed and she felt the blood beating in her throat,

in her eyes, the hatred, the helpless terror in her blood. She felt the hatred

and his hands; his hands moving over her body, the hands that broke granite. She

fought in a last convulsion. Then the sudden pain shot up, through her body, to

her throat, and she screamed. Then she lay still.

It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in

contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a

lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of

scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit.

One gesture of tenderness from him--and she would have remained cold, untouched

by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful,

contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted. Then she

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felt him shaking with the agony of a pleasure unbearable even to him, she knew

that she had given that to him, that it came from her, from her body, and she

bit her lips and she knew what he had wanted her to know.

He lay still across the bed, away from her, his head hanging back over the edge.

She heard the slow, ending gasps of his breath. She lay on her back, as he had

left her, not moving, her mouth open. She felt empty, light and flat.

She saw him get up. She saw his silhouette against the window. He went out,

without a word or a glance at her. She noticed that, but it did not matter. She

listened blankly to the sound of his steps moving away in the garden.

She lay still for a long time. Then she moved her tongue in her open mouth. She

heard a sound that came from somewhere within her, and it was the dry, short,

sickening sound of a sob, but she was not crying, her eyes were held paralyzed,

dry and open. The sound became motion, a jolt running down her throat to her

stomach. It flung her up, she stood awkwardly, bent over, her forearms pressed

to her stomach. She heard the small table by the bed rattling in the darkness,

and she looked at it, in empty astonishment that a table should move without

reason. Then she understood that she was shaking. She was not frightened; it

seemed foolish to shake like that, in short, separate jerks, like soundless

hiccoughs. She thought she must take a bath. The need was unbearable, as if she

had felt it for a long time. Nothing mattered, if only she would take a bath.

She dragged her feet slowly to the door of her bathroom.

She turned the light on in the bathroom. She saw herself in a tall mirror. She

saw the purple bruises left on her body by his mouth. She heard a moan muffled

in her throat, not very loud. It was not the sight, but the sudden flash of

knowledge. She knew that she would not take a bath. She knew that she wanted to

keep the feeling of his body, the traces of his body on hers, knowing also what

such a desire implied. She fell on her knees, clasping the edge of the bathtub.

She could not make herself crawl over that edge. Her hands slipped, she lay

still on the floor. The tiles were hard and cold under her body. She lay there

till morning.

Roark awakened in the morning and thought that last night had been like a point

reached, like a stop in the movement of his life. He was moving forward for the

sake of such stops; like the moments when he had walked through the

half-finished Heller house; like last night. In some unstated way, last night

had been what building was to him; in some quality of reaction within him, in

what it gave to his consciousness of existence.

They had been united in an understanding beyond the violence, beyond the

deliberate obscenity of his action; had she meant less to him, he would not have

taken her as he did; had he meant less to her, she would not have fought so

desperately. The unrepeatable exultation was in knowing that they both

understood this.

He went to the quarry and he worked that day as usual. She did not come to the

quarry and he did not expect her to come. But the thought of her remained. He

watched it with curiosity. It was strange to be conscious of another person’s

existence, to feel it as a close, urgent necessity; a necessity without

qualifications, neither pleasant nor painful, merely final like an ultimatum. It

was important to know that she existed in the world; it was important to think

of her, of how she had awakened this morning, of how she moved, with her body

still his, now his forever, of what she thought.

That evening, at dinner in the sooted kitchen, he opened a newspaper and saw the

name of Roger Enright in the lines of a gossip column. He read the short

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paragraph:

"It looks like another grand project on its way to the wastebasket. Roger

Enright, the oil king, seems to be stumped this time. He’ll have to call a halt

to his latest pipe dream of an Enright House. Architect trouble, we are told.

Seems as if half a dozen of the big building boys have been shown the gate by

the unsatisfiable Mr. Enright. Top-notchers, all of them."

Roark felt the wrench he had tried so often to fight, not to let it hurt him too

much: the wrench of helplessness before the vision of what he could do, what

should have been possible and was closed to him. Then, without reason, he

thought of Dominique Francon. She had no relation to the things in his mind; he

was shocked only to know that she could remain present even among these things.

A week passed. Then, one evening, he found a letter waiting for him at home. It

had been forwarded from his former office to his last New York address, from

there to Mike, from Mike to Connecticut. The engraved address of an oil company

on the envelope meant nothing to him. He opened the letter. He read:

#

"Dear Mr. Roark,

"I have been endeavoring for some time to get in touch with you, but have been

unable to locate you. Please communicate with me at your earliest convenience. I

should like to discuss with you my proposed Enright House, if you are the man

who built the Fargo Store.

"Sincerely yours,

"Roger Enright."

#

Half an hour later Roark was on a train. When the train started moving, he

remembered Dominique and that he was leaving her behind. The thought seemed

distant and unimportant. He was astonished only to know that he still thought of

her, even now.

#

She could accept, thought Dominique, and come to forget in time everything that

had happened to her, save one memory: that she had found pleasure in the thing

which had happened, that he had known it, and more: that he had known it before

he came to her and that he would not have come but for that knowledge. She had

not given him the one answer that would have saved her: an answer of simple

revulsion--she had found joy in her revulsion, in her terror and in his

strength. That was the degradation she had wanted and she hated him for it.

She found a letter one morning, waiting for her on the breakfast table. It was

from Alvah Scarret. "...When are you coming back, Dominique? I can’t tell you

how much we miss you here. You’re not a comfortable person to have around, I’m

actually scared of you, but I might as well inflate your inflated ego some more,

at a distance, and confess that we’re all waiting for you impatiently. It will

be like the homecoming of an Empress."

She read it and smiled. She thought, if they knew...those people...that old life

and that awed reverence before her person...I’ve been raped...I’ve been raped by

some redheaded hoodlum from a stone quarry....I, Dominique Francon....Through

the fierce sense of humiliation, the words gave her the same kind of pleasure

she had felt in his arms.

She thought of it when she walked through the countryside, when she passed

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people on the road and the people bowed to her, the chatelaine of the town. She

wanted to scream it to the hearing of all.

She was not conscious of the days that passed. She felt content in a strange

detachment, alone with the words she kept repeating to herself. Then, one

morning, standing on the lawn in her garden, she understood that a week had

passed and that she had not seen him for a week. She turned and walked rapidly

across the lawn to the road. She was going to the quarry.

She walked the miles to the quarry, down the road, bareheaded in the sun. She

did not hurry. It was not necessary to hurry. It was inevitable. To see him

again....She had no purpose. The need was too great to name a

purpose....Afterward...There were other things, hideous, important things behind

her and rising vaguely in her mind, but first, above all, just one thing: to see

him again...

She came to the quarry and she looked slowly, carefully, stupidly about her,

stupidly because the enormity of what she saw would not penetrate her brain: she

saw at once that he was not there. The work was in full swing, the sun was high

over the busiest hour of the day, there was not an idle man in sight, but he was

not among the men. She stood, waiting numbly, for a long time.

Then she saw the foreman and she motioned for him to approach.

"Good afternoon, Miss Francon....Lovely day, Miss Francon, isn’t it? Just like

the middle of summer again and yet fall’s not far away, yes, fall’s coming, look

at the leaves, Miss Francon."

She asked:

"There was a man you had here...a man with very bright orange hair...where is

he?"

"Oh yes. That one. He’s gone."