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spectacle to be admired, but of no direct concern in their lives.

For two weeks after their wedding they never left the penthouse. She could have

pressed the button of the elevator and broken these weeks any time she wished;

she did not wish it. She had no desire to resist, to wonder, to question. It was

enchantment and peace.

He sat talking to her for hours when she wanted. He was content to sit silently,

when she preferred, and look at her as he looked at the objects in his art

gallery, with the same distant, undisturbing glance. He answered any question

she put to him. He never asked questions. He never spoke of what he felt. When

she wished to be alone, he did not call for her. One evening she sat reading in

her room and saw him standing at the frozen parapet of the dark roof garden

outside, not looking back at the house, only standing in the streak of light

from her window.

When the two weeks ended, he went back to his work, to the office of the Banner.

But the sense of isolation remained, like a theme declared and to be preserved

through all their future days. He came home in the evening and the city ceased

to exist. He had no desire to go anywhere. He invited no guests.

He never mentioned it, but she knew that he did not want her to step out of the

house, neither with him nor alone. It was a quiet obsession which he did not

expect to enforce. When he came home, he asked: "Have you been out?"--never:

"Where have you been?" It was not jealousy--the "where" did not matter. When she

wanted to buy a pair of shoes, he had three stores send a collection of shoes

for her choice--it prevented her visit to a store. When she said she wanted to

see a certain picture, he had a projection room built on the roof.

She obeyed, for the first few months. When she realized that she loved their

isolation, she broke it at once. She made him accept invitations and she invited

guests to their house. He complied without protest.

But he maintained a wall she could not break--the wall he had erected between

his wife and his newspapers. Her name never appeared in their pages. He stopped

every attempt to draw Mrs. Gail Wynand into public life--to head committees,

sponsor charity drives, endorse crusades. He did not hesitate to open her

mail--if it bore an official letterhead that betrayed its purpose--to destroy it

without answer and to tell her that he had destroyed it. She shrugged and said

nothing.

Yet he did not seem to share her contempt for his papers. He did not allow her

to discuss them. She could not discover what he thought of them, nor what he

felt. Once, when she commented on an offensive editorial, he said coldly:

"I’ve never apologized for the Banner. I never will."

"But this is really awful, Gail."

"I thought you married me as the publisher of the Banner."

"I thought you didn’t like to think of that."

"What I like or dislike doesn’t concern you. Don’t expect me to change the

Banner or sacrifice it. I wouldn’t do that for anyone on earth."

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She laughed. "I wouldn’t ask it, Gail."

He did not laugh in answer.

In his office in the Banner Building, he worked with a new energy, a kind of

elated, ferocious drive that surprised the men who had known him in his most

ambitious years. He stayed in the office all night when necessary, as he had not

done for a long time. Nothing changed in his methods and policy. Alvah Scarret

watched him with satisfaction. "We were wrong about him, Ellsworth," said

Scarret to his constant companion, "it’s the same old Gail, God bless him.

Better than ever."

"My dear Alvah," said Toohey, "nothing is ever as simple as you think--nor as

fast."

"But he’s happy. Don’t you see that he’s happy?"

"To be happy is the most dangerous thing that could have happened to him. And,

as a humanitarian for once, I mean this for his own sake."

Sally Brent decided to outwit her boss. Sally Brent was one of the proudest

possessions of the Banner, a stout, middle-aged woman who dressed like a model

for a style show of the twenty-first century and wrote like a chambermaid. She

had a large personal following among the readers of the Banner. Her popularity

made her overconfident.

Sally Brent decided to do a story on Mrs. Gail Wynand. It was just her type of

story and there it was, simply going to waste. She gained admittance to Wynand’s

penthouse, using the tactics of gaining admittance to places where one is not

wanted which she had been taught as a well-trained Wynand employee. She made her

usual dramatic entrance, wearing a black dress with a fresh sunflower on her

shoulder--her constant ornament that had become a personal trade-mark--and she

said to Dominique breathlessly: "Mrs. Wynand, I’ve come here to help you deceive

your husband!"

Then she winked at her own naughtiness and explained: "Our dear Mr. Wynand has

been unfair to you, my dear, depriving you of your rightful fame, for some

reason which I just simply can’t understand. But we’ll fix him, you and I. What

can a man do when we girls get together? He simply doesn’t know what good copy

you are. So just give me your story, and I’ll write it, and it will be so good

that he just simply won’t be able not to run it."

Dominique was alone at home, and she smiled in a manner which Sally Brent had

never seen before, so the right adjectives did not occur to Sally’s usually

observant mind. Dominique gave her the story. She gave the exact kind of story

Sally had dreamed about.

"Yes, of course I cook his breakfast," said Dominique. "Ham and eggs is his

favorite dish, just plain ham and eggs...Oh yes, Miss Brent, I’m very happy. I

open my eyes in the morning and I say to myself, it can’t be true, it’s not poor

little me who’s become the wife of the great Gail Wynand who had all the

glamorous beauties of the world to choose from. You see, I’ve been in love with

him for years. He was just a dream to me, a beautiful, impossible dream. And now

it’s like a dream come true....Please, Miss Brent, take this message from me to

the women of America: Patience is always rewarded and romance is just around the

corner. I think it’s a beautiful thought and perhaps it will help other girls as

it has helped me....Yes, all I want of life is to make Gail happy, to share his

joys and sorrows, to be a good wife and mother."

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Alvah Scarret read the story and liked it so much that he lost all caution. "Run

it off, Alvah," Sally Brent urged him, "just have a proof run off and leave it

on his desk. He’ll okay it, see if he won’t." That evening Sally Brent was

fired. Her costly contract was bought off--it had three more years to run--and

she was told never to enter the Banner Building again for any purpose

whatsoever.

Scarret protested in panic: "Gail, you can’t fire Sally! Not Sally!"

"When I can’t fire anyone I wish on my paper, I’ll close it and blow up the

God-damn building," said Wynand calmly.

"But her public! We’ll lose her public!"

"To hell with her public."

That night, at dinner, Wynand took from his pocket a crumpled wad of paper--the

proof cut of the story--and threw it, without a word, at Dominique’s face across

the table. It hit her cheek and fell to the floor. She picked it up, unrolled

it, saw what it was and laughed aloud.

Sally Brent wrote an article on Gail Wynand’s love life. In a gay, intellectual

manner, in the terms of sociological study, the article presented material such

as no pulp magazine would have accepted. It was published in the New Frontiers.

#

Wynand bought Dominique a necklace designed at his special order. It was made of

diamonds without visible settings, spaced wide apart in an irregular pattern,

like a handful scattered accidentally, held together by platinum chains made

under a microscope, barely noticeable. When he clasped it about her neck, it

looked like drops of water fallen at random.

She stood before a mirror. She slipped her dressing gown off her shoulders and

let the raindrops glitter on her skin. She said:

"That life story of the Bronx housewife who murdered her husband’s young

mistress is pretty sordid, Gail. But I think there’s something dirtier--the

curiosity of the people who like to read about it. And then there’s something

dirtier still--the people who pander to that curiosity. Actually, it was that

housewife--she has piano legs and such a baggy neck in her pictures--who made

this necklace possible. It’s a beautiful necklace. I shall be proud to wear it."

He smiled; the sudden brightness of his eyes had an odd quality of courage.

"That’s one way of looking at it," he said. "There’s another. I like to think

that I took the worst refuse of the human spirit--the mind of that housewife and

the minds of the people who like to read about her--and I made of it this

necklace on your shoulders. I like to think that I was an alchemist capable of

performing so great a purification."

She saw no apology, no regret, no resentment as he looked at her. It was a

strange glance; she had noticed it before; a glance of simple worship. And it

made her realize that there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper

himself an object of reverence.

She was sitting before her mirror when he entered her dressing room on the

following night. He bent down, he pressed his lips to the back of her neck--and

he saw a square of paper attached to the corner of her mirror. It was the

decoded copy of the cablegram that had ended her career on the Banner. FIRE THE

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BITCH. G W

He lifted his shoulders, to stand erect behind her. He asked:

"How did you get that?"

"Ellsworth Toohey gave it to me. I thought it was worth preserving. Of course, I

didn’t know it would ever become so appropriate."

He inclined his head gravely, acknowledging the authorship, and said nothing

else.

She expected to find the cablegram gone next morning. But he had not touched it.

She would not remove it. It remained on display on the corner of her mirror.

When he held her in his arms, she often saw his eyes move to that square of

paper. She could not tell what he thought.

#

In the spring, a publishers’ convention took him away from New York for a week.

It was their first separation. Dominique surprised him by coming to meet him at

the airport when he returned. She was gay and gentle; her manner held a promise

he had never expected, could not trust, and found himself trusting completely.

When he entered the drawing room of their penthouse and slumped down, half

stretching on a couch, she knew that he wanted to lie still here, to feel the

recaptured safety of his own world. She saw his eyes, open, delivered to her,

without defense. She stood straight, ready. She said:

"You’d better dress, Gail. We’re going to the theater tonight."

He lifted himself to a sitting posture. He smiled, the slanting ridges standing

out on his forehead. She had a cold feeling of admiration for him: the control

was perfect, all but these ridges. He said:

"Fine. Black tie or white?"

"White. I have tickets for No Skin Off Your Nose. They were very hard to get."

It was too much; it seemed too ludicrous to be part of this moment’s contest

between them. He broke down by laughing frankly, in helpless disgust.

"Good God, Dominique, not that one!"

"Why, Gail, it’s the biggest hit in town. Your own critic, Jules Fougler"--he

stopped laughing. He understood--"said it was the great play of our age.

Ellsworth Toohey said it was the fresh voice of the coming new world. Alvah

Scarret said it was not written in ink, but in the milk of human kindness. Sally

Brent--before you fired her--said it made her laugh with a lump in her throat.

Why, it’s the godchild of the Banner. I thought you would certainly want to see

it."

"Yes, of course," he said.

He got up and went to dress.

No Skin Off Your Nose had been running for many months. Ellsworth Toohey had

mentioned regretfully in his column that the title of the play had had to be

changed slightly--"as a concession to the stuffy prudery of the middle class

which still controls our theater. It is a crying example of interference with

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the freedom of the artist. Now don’t let’s hear any more of that old twaddle

about ours being a free society. Originally, the title of this beautiful play

was an authentic line drawn from the language of the people, with the brave,

simple eloquence of folk expression."

Wynand and Dominique sat in the center of the fourth row, not looking at each

other, listening to the play. The things being done on the stage were merely

trite and crass; but the undercurrent made them frightening. There was an air

about the ponderous inanities spoken, which the actors had absorbed like an

infection; it was in their smirking faces, in the slyness of their voices; in

their untidy gestures. It was an air of inanities uttered as revelations and

insolently demanding acceptance as such; an air, not of innocent presumption,

but of conscious effrontery; as if the author knew the nature of his work and

boasted of his power to make it appear sublime in the minds of his audience and

thus destroy the capacity for the sublime within them. The work justified the

verdict of its sponsors: it brought laughs, it was amusing; it was an indecent

joke, acted out not on the stage but in the audience. It was a pedestal from

which a god had been torn, and in his place there stood, not Satan with a sword,

but a corner lout sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola.

There was silence in the audience, puzzled and humble. When someone laughed, the

rest joined in, with relief, glad to learn that they were enjoying themselves.

Jules Fougler had not tried to influence anybody; he had merely made clear--well