"Katie! You're not talking some fallen girl out of her problem. You're speaking about yourself."
"Is there any essential difference? Everybody's problems are the same, just like everybody's emotions."
He saw her nibbling a thin strip of bread with a smear of green, and noticed that his order had been served. He moved his fork about in his salad bowl, and he made himself bite into a gray piece of diet cracker. Then he discovered how strange it was when one lost the knack of eating automatically and had to do it by full conscious effort; the cracker seemed inexhaustible; he could not finish the process of chewing; he moved his jaws without reducing the amount of gritty pulp in his mouth.
"Katie ... for six years ... I thought of how I'd ask your forgiveness some day. And now I have the chance, but I won't ask it. It seems ... it seems beside the point. I know it's horrible to say that, but that's how it seems to me. It was the worst thing I ever did in my life — but not because I hurt you. I did hurt you, Katie, and maybe more than you know yourself. But that's not my worst guilt ... Katie, I wanted to marry you. It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that's the sin that can't be forgiven — that I hadn't done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there's no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain — and wasted pain ... Katie, why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world — to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. As I wanted to marry you. Not as I want to sleep with some woman or get drunk or get my name in the papers. Those things — they're not even desires — they're things people do to escape from desires — because it's such a big responsibility, really to want something."
"Peter, what you're saying is very ugly and selfish."
"Maybe. I don't know. I've always had to tell you the truth. About everything. Even if you didn't ask. I had to."
"Yes. You did. It was a commendable trait. You were a charming boy, Peter."
It was the bowl of sugar-coated almonds on the counter that hurt him, he thought in a dull anger. The almonds were green and white; they had no business being green and white at this time of the year; the colors of St. Patrick's Day — then there was always candy like that in all the store windows — and St. Patrick's Day meant spring — no, better than spring, that moment of wonderful anticipation just before spring is to begin.
"Katie, I won't say that I'm still in love with you. I don't know whether I am or not. I've never asked myself. It wouldn't matter now. I'm not saying this because I hope for anything or think of trying or ... I know only that I loved you, Katie, I loved you, whatever I made of it, even if this is how I've got to say it for the last time, I loved you, Katie."
She looked at him — and she seemed pleased. Not stirred, not happy, not pitying; but pleased in a casual way. He thought: If she were completely the spinster, the frustrated social worker, as people think of those women, the kind who would scorn sex in the haughty conceit of her own virtue, that would still be recognition, if only in hostility. But this — this amused tolerance seemed to admit that romance was only human, one had to take it, like everybody else, it was a popular weakness of no great consequence — she was gratified as she would have been gratified by the same words from any other man — it was like that red-enamel Mexican on her lapel, a contemptuous concession to people's demand of vanity.
"Katie ... Katie, let's say that this doesn't count — this, now — it's past counting anyway, isn't it? This can't touch what it was like, can it, Katie? ... People always regret that the past is so final, that nothing can change it — but I'm glad it's so. We can't spoil it. We can think of the past, can't we? Why shouldn't we? I mean, as you said, like grownup people, not fooling ourselves, not trying to hope, but only to look back at it ... Do you remember when I came to your house in New York for the first time? You looked so thin and small, and your hair hung every which way. I told you I would never love anyone else. I held you on my lap, you didn't weigh anything at all, and I told you I would never love anyone else. And you said you knew it."
"I remember."
"When we were together ... Katie, I'm ashamed of so many things, but not of one moment when we were together. When I asked you to marry me — no, I never asked you to marry me — I just said we were engaged — and you said 'yes' — it was on a park bench — it was snowing ... "
"Yes."
"You had funny woolen gloves. Like mittens. I remember — there were drops of water in the fuzz — round — like crystal — they flashed — it was because a car passed by."
"Yes, I think it's agreeable to look back occasionally. But one's perspective widens. One grows richer spiritually with the years."
He kept silent for a long time. Then he said, his voice flat:
"I'm sorry."
"Why? You're very sweet, Peter. I've always said men are the sentimentalists."
He thought: It's not an act — one can't put on an act like that — unless it's an act inside, for oneself, and then there is no limit, no way out, no reality ...
She went on talking to him, and after a while it was about Washington again. He answered when it was necessary.
He thought that he had believed it was a simple sequence, the past and the present, and if there was loss in the past one was compensated by pain in the present, and pain gave it a form of immortality — but he had not known that one could destroy like this, kill retroactively — so that to her it had never existed.
She glanced at her wrist watch and gave a little gasp of impatience,
"I'm late already. I must run along."
He said heavily:
"Do you mind if I don't go with you, Katie? It's not rudeness. I just think it's better."
"But of course. Not at all. I'm quite able to find my way in the streets and there's no need for formalities among old friends." She added, gathering her bag and gloves, crumpling a paper napkin into a ball, dropping it neatly into her teacup: "I'll give you a ring next time I'm in town and we'll have a bite together again. Though I can't promise when that will be. I'm so busy, I have to go so many places, last month it was Detroit and next week I'm flying to St. Louis, but when they shoot me out to New York again, I'll ring you up, so long, Peter, it was ever so nice."
11.
GAIL WYNAND looked at the shining wood of the yacht deck. The wood and a brass doorknob that had become a smear of fire gave him a sense of everything around him: the miles of space filled with sun, between the burning spreads of sky and ocean. It was February, and the yacht lay still, her engines idle, in the southern Pacific.
He leaned on the rail and looked down at Roark in the water. Roark floated on his back, his body stretched into a straight line, arms spread, eyes closed. The tan of his skin implied a month of days such as this. Wynand thought that this was the way he liked to apprehend space and time: through the power of his yacht, through the tan of Roark's skin or the sunbrown of his own arms folded before him on the rail.
He had not sailed his yacht for several years. This time he had wanted Roark to be his only guest. Dominique was left behind.
Wynand had said: "You're killing yourself, Howard. You've been going at a pace nobody can stand for long. Ever since Monadnock, isn't it? Think you'd have the courage to perform the feat most difficult for you — to rest?"
He was astonished when Roark accepted without argument. Roark laughed:
"I'm not running away from my work, if that's what surprises you. I know when to stop — and I can't stop, unless it's completely. I know I've overdone it. I've been wasting too much paper lately and doing awful stuff."