Austen Heller, who had been her friend, spoke to her about it. He was angrier than she had ever seen him; his face lost all the charm of his usual sarcastic poise.
"What in hell do you think you're doing, Dominique?" he snapped. "This is the greatest exhibition of journalistic hooliganism I've ever seen swilled out in public print. Why don't you leave that sort of thing to Ellsworth Toohey?"
"Ellsworth is good, isn't he?" she said.
"At least, he's had the decency to keep his unsanitary trap shut about Roark — though, of course, that too is an indecency. But what's happened to you? Do you realize who and what you're talking about? It was all right when you amused yourself by praising some horrible abortion of Grandpaw Holcombe's or panning the pants off your own father and that pretty butcher's-calendar boy that he's got himself for a partner. It didn't matter one way or another. But to bring that same intellectual manner to the appraisal of someone like Roark ... You know, I really thought you had integrity and judgment — if ever given a chance to exercise them. In fact, I thought you were behaving like a tramp only to emphasize the mediocrity of the saps whose works you had to write about. I didn't think that you were just an irresponsible bitch."
"You were wrong," she said.
Roger Enright entered her office, one morning, and said, without greeting: "Get your hat. You're coming to see it with me."
"Good morning, Roger," she said. "To see what?"
"The Enright House. As much of it as we've got put up."
"Why, certainly, Roger," she smiled, rising, "I'd love to see the Enright House."
On their way, she asked: "What's the matter, Roger? Trying to bribe me?"
He sat stiffly on the vast, gray cushions of his limousine, not looking at her. He answered: "I can understand stupid malice. I can understand ignorant malice. I can't understand deliberate rottenness. You are free, of course, to write anything you wish — afterward. But it won't be stupidity and it won't be ignorance."
"You overestimate me, Roger," she shrugged, and said nothing else for the rest of the ride.
They walked together past the wooden fence, into the jungle of naked steel and planks that was to be the Enright House. Her high heels stepped lightly over lime-spattered boards and she walked, leaning back, in careless, insolent elegance. She stopped and looked at the sky held in a frame of steel, the sky that seemed more distant than usual, thrust back by the sweeping length of beams. She looked at the steel cages of future projections, at the insolent angles, at the incredible complexity of this shape coming to life as a simple, logical whole, a naked skeleton with planes of air to form the walls, a naked skeleton on a cold winter day, with a sense of birth and promise, like a bare tree with a first touch of green.
"Oh, Roger!"
He looked at her and saw the kind of face one should expect to see in church at Easter.
"I didn't underestimate either one," he said dryly. "Neither you nor the building."
"Good morning," said a low, hard voice beside them.
She was not shocked to see Roark. She had not heard him approaching, but it would have been unnatural to think of this building without him. She felt that he simply was there, that he had been there from the moment she crossed the outside fence, that this structure was he, in a manner more personal than his body. He stood before them, his hand thrust into the pockets of a loose coat, his hair hatless in the cold.
"Miss Francon — Mr. Roark," said Enright.
"We have met once," she said, "at the Holcombes. If Mr. Roark remembers."
"Of course, Miss Francon," said Roark.
"I wanted Miss Francon to see it," said Enright.
"Shall I show you around?" Roark asked him.
"Yes, do please," she answered first.
The three of them walked together through the structure, and the workers stared curiously at Dominique. Roark explained the layout of future rooms, the system of elevators, the heating plant, the arrangement of windows — as he would have explained it to a contractor's assistant. She asked questions and he answered. "How many cubic feet of space, Mr. Roark?"
"How many tons of steel?"
"Be careful of these pipes, Miss Francon. Step this way." Enright walked along, his eyes on the ground, looking at nothing. But then he asked: "How's it going, Howard?" and Roark smiled, answering: "Two days ahead of schedule," and they stood talking about the job, like brothers, forgetting her for a moment, the clanging roar of machines around them drowning out their words.
She thought, standing here in the heart of the building, that if she had nothing of him, nothing but his body, here it was, offered to her, the rest of him, to be seen and touched, open to all; the girders and the conduits and the sweeping reaches of space were his and could not have been anyone else's in the world; his, as his face, as his soul; here was the shape he had made and the thing within him which had caused him to make it, the end and the cause together, the motive power eloquent in every line of steel, a man's self, hers for this moment, hers by grace of her seeing it and understanding.
"Are you tired, Miss Francon?" asked Roark, looking at her face.
"No," she said, "no, not at all. I have been thinking — what kind of plumbing fixtures are you going to use here, Mr. Roark?"
A few days later, in his room, sitting on the edge of his drafting table, she looked at a newspaper, at her column and the lines: "I have visited the Enright construction site. I wish that in some future air raid a bomb would blast this house out of existence. It would be a worthy ending. So much better than to see it growing old and soot-stained, degraded by the family photographs, the dirty socks, the cocktail shakers and the grapefruit rinds of its inhabitants. There is not a person in New York City who should be allowed to live in this building."
Roark came to stand beside her, his legs pressed to her knees, and he looked down at the paper, smiling.
"You have Roger completely bewildered by this," he said.
"Has he read it?"
"I was in his office this morning when he read it. At first, he called you some names I'd never heard before. Then he said, Wait a minute, and he read it again, he looked up, very puzzled, but not angry at all, and he said, if you read it one way ... but on the other hand ... "
"What did you say?"
"Nothing. You know, Dominique, I'm very grateful, but when are you going to stop handing me all that extravagant praise? Someone else might see it. And you won't like that."
"Someone else?"
"You know that I got it, from that first article of yours about the Enright House. You wanted me to get it. But don't you think someone else might understand your way of doing things?"
"Oh yes. But the effect — for you — will be worse than if they didn't. They'll like you the less for it. However, I don't know who'll even bother to understand. Unless it's ... Roark, what do you think of Ellsworth Toohey?"
"Good God, why should anyone think of Ellsworth Toohey?"
She liked the rare occasions when she met Roark at some gathering where Heller or Enright had brought him. She liked the polite, impersonal "Miss Francon" pronounced by his voice. She enjoyed the nervous concern of the hostess and her efforts not to let them come together. She knew that the people around them expected some explosion, some shocking sign of hostility which never came. She did not seek Roark out and she did not avoid him. They spoke to each other if they happened to be included in the same group, as they would have spoken to anyone else. It required no effort; it was real and right; it made everything right, even this gathering. She found a deep sense of fitness in the fact that here, among people, they should be strangers; strangers and enemies. She thought, these people can think of many things he and I are to each other — except what we are. It made the moments she remembered greater, the moments not touched by the sight of others, by the words of others, not even by their knowledge. She thought, it has no existence here, except in me and in him. She felt a sense of possession, such as she could feel nowhere else. She could never own him as she owned him in a room among strangers when she seldom looked in his direction. If she glanced at him across the room and saw him in conversation with blank, indifferent faces, she turned away, unconcerned; if the faces were hostile, she watched for a second, pleased; she was angry when she saw a smile, a sign of warmth or approval on a face turned to him. It was not jealousy; she did not care whether the face was a man's or a woman's; she resented the approval as an impertinence.