"You think you're good, don't you?" he asked.
"I always did," she answered defiantly, without turning.
"Well, let me sec you prove it. Let me see how far you'll rise with Taggart Transcontinental. No matter how good you are, I'll expect you to wring everything you've got, trying to be still better. And when you've worn yourself out to reach a goal, I'll expect you to start for another."
"Why do you think that I care to prove anything to you?" she asked.
"Want me to answer?"
"No," she whispered, her eyes fixed upon the other shore of the river in the distance.
She heard him chuckling, and after a while he said, "Dagny, there's nothing of any importance in life - except how well you do your work.
Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean."
"I know it now. But . . . Francisco, why are you and I the only ones who seem to know it?"
"Why should you care about the others?"
"Because I like to understand things, and there's something about people that I can't understand."
"What?"
"Well, I've always been unpopular in school and it didn't bother me, but now I've discovered the reason. It's an impossible kind of reason.
They dislike me, not because I do things badly, but because I do them well. They dislike me because I've always had the best grades in the class. I don't even have to study. I always get A's. Do you suppose I should try to get D's for a change and become the most popular girl in school?"
Francisco stopped, looked at her and slapped her face.
What she felt was contained in a single instant, while the ground rocked under her feet, in a single blast of emotion within her. She knew that she would have killed any other person who struck her; she felt the violent fury which would have given her the strength for it - and as violent a pleasure that Francisco had done it. She felt pleasure from the dull, hot pain in her cheek and from the taste of blood in the corner of
her mouth. She felt pleasure in what she suddenly grasped about him, about herself and about his motive.
She braced her feet to stop the dizziness, she held her head straight and stood facing him in the consciousness of a new power, feeling herself his equal for the first time, looking at him with a mocking smile of triumph.
"Did I hurt you as much as that?" she asked.
He looked astonished; the question and the smile were not those of a child. He answered, "Yes - if it pleases you."
"It does."
"Don't ever do that again. Don't crack jokes of that kind."
"Don't be a fool. Whatever made you think that I cared about being popular?"
"When you grow up, you'll understand what sort of unspeakable thing you said."
"I understand it now."
He turned abruptly, took out his handkerchief and dipped it in the water of the river. "Come here," he ordered.
She laughed, stepping back, "Oh no. I want to keep it as it is. I hope it swells terribly. I like it."
He looked at her for a long moment. He said slowly, very earnestly, "Dagny, you're wonderful."
"I thought that you always thought so," she answered, her voice insolently casual.
When she came home, she told her mother that she had cut her lip by falling against a rock. It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share, Next summer, when Francisco came, she was sixteen. She started running down the hill to meet him, but stopped abruptly. He saw it, stopped, and they stood for a moment, looking at each other across the distance of a long, green slope. It was he who walked up toward her, walked very slowly, while she stood waiting.
When he approached, she smiled innocently, as if unconscious of any contest intended or won.
"You might like to know," she said, "that I have a job on the railroad.
Night operator at Rockdale."
He laughed. "All right, Taggart Transcontinental, now it's a race.
Let's see who'll do greater honor, you - to Nat Taggart, or I - to Sebastian d'Anconia."
That winter, she stripped her life down to the bright simplicity of a geometrical drawing: a few straight lines - to and from the engineering college in the city each day, to and from her job at Rockdale Station each night - and the closed circle of her room, a room littered with diagrams of motors, blueprints of steel structures, and railroad timetables.
Mrs. Taggart watched her daughter in unhappy bewilderment. She could have forgiven all the omissions, but one: Dagny showed no sign of interest in men, no romantic inclination whatever. Mrs. Taggart did not approve of extremes; she had been prepared to contend with an extreme of the opposite kind, if necessary; she found herself thinking that this was worse. She felt embarrassed when she had to admit that her daughter, at seventeen, did not have a single admirer.
"Dagny and Francisco d'Anconia?" she said, smiting ruefully, in answer to the curiosity of her friends. "Oh no, it's not a romance. It's an international industrial cartel of some kind. That's all they seem to care about."
Mrs. Taggart heard James say one evening, in the presence of guests, a peculiar tone of satisfaction in his voice, "Dagny, even though you were named after her, you really look more like Nat Taggart than like that first Dagny Taggart, the famous beauty who was his wife." Mrs. Taggart did not know which offended her most: that James said it or that Dagny accepted it happily as a compliment.
She would never have a chance, thought Mrs. Taggart, to form some conception of her own daughter. Dagny was only a figure hurrying in and out of the apartment, a slim figure in a leather jacket, with a raised collar, a short skirt and long show-girl legs. She walked, cutting across a room, with a masculine, straight-line abruptness, but she had a peculiar grace of motion that was swift, tense and oddly, challengingly feminine.
At times, catching a glimpse of Dagny's face, Mrs. Taggart caught an expression which she could not quite define: it was much more than gaiety, it was the look of such an untouched purity of enjoyment that she found it abnormal, too: no young girl could be so insensitive as to have discovered no sadness in life. Her daughter, she concluded, was incapable of emotion.
"Dagny.," she asked once, "don't you ever want to have a good time?" Dagny looked at her incredulously and answered, "What do you think I'm having?"
The decision to give her daughter a formal debut cost Mrs. Taggart a great deal of anxious thought. She did not know whether she was introducing to New York society Miss Dagny Taggart of the Social Register or the night operator of Rockdale Station; she was inclined to believe it was more truly this last; and she felt certain that Dagny would reject the idea of such an occasion. She was astonished when Dagny accepted it with inexplicable eagerness, for once like a child.
She was astonished again, when she saw Dagny dressed for the party, It was the first feminine dress she had ever worn - a gown of white chiffon with a huge skirt that floated like a cloud. Mrs. Taggart had expected her to look like a preposterous contrast. Dagny looked like a beauty. She seemed both older and more radiantly innocent than usual; standing in front of a mirror, she held her head as Nat Taggart's wife would have held it.
"Dagny," Mrs. Taggart said gently, reproachfully, "do you see how beautiful you can be when you want to?"
"Yes," said Dagny, without any astonishment.
The ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel had been decorated under Mrs. Taggart's direction; she had an artist's taste, and the setting of that evening was her masterpiece. "Dagny, there are things I would like you to learn to notice," she said, "lights, colors, flowers, music.
They are not as negligible as you might think." "I've never thought they're negligible," Dagny answered happily. For once, Mrs. Taggart felt a bond between them; Dagny was looking at her with a child's grateful trust. "They're the things that make life beautiful," said Mrs.
Taggart. "I want this evening to be very beautiful for you, Dagny. The first ball is the most romantic event of one's life."
To Mrs. Taggart, the greatest surprise was the moment when she saw Dagny standing under the lights, looking at the ballroom. This was not a child, not a girl, but a woman of such confident, dangerous power that Mrs. Taggart stared at her with shocked admiration. In an age of casual, cynical, indifferent routine, among people who held themselves as if they were not flesh, but meat - Dagny's bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one's half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure. And this - thought Mrs. Taggart, smiling - was the girl she had believed to be devoid of sexual capacity. She felt an immense relief, and a touch of amusement at the thought that a discovery of this kind should make her