"He's a damn half-wit who doesn't have the faintest idea of how to deal with practical reality!"

"But you do, don't you, Jim?"

"You bet I do!"

"Then couldn't you have helped Scudder?"

"I?" He burst into helpless, angry laughter. "Oh, why don't you grow up? I did my best to get Scudder thrown to the lions! Somebody had to be. Don't you know that it was my neck, if some other hadn't been found?"

"Your neck? Why not Dagny's, if she was wrong? Because she wasn't?"

"Dagny is in an entirely different category! It had to be Scudder or me."

"Why?"

"And it's much better for national policy to let it be Scudder. This way, it's not necessary to argue about what she said—and if anybody brings it up, we start howling that it was said on Scudder's program and that Scudder's programs have been discredited and that Scudder is a proven fraud and liar, etc., etc.—and do you think the public will be able to unscramble it? Nobody's ever trusted Bertram Scudder, anyway.

Oh, don't stare at me like that! Would you rather they'd picked me to discredit?"

"Why not Dagny? Because her speech could not be discredited?"

"If you're so damn sorry for Bertram Scudder, you should have seen him try his damndest to make them break my neck! He's been doing that for years—how do you think he got to where he was, except by climbing on carcasses? He thought he was pretty powerful, too—you should have seen how the big business tycoons used to be afraid of him! But he got himself outmaneuvered, this time. This time, he belonged to the wrong faction."

Dimly, through the pleasant stupor of relaxing, of sprawling back in his chair and smiling, he knew that this was the enjoyment he wanted: to be himself. To be himself—he thought, in the drugged, precarious state of floating past the deadliest of his blind alleys, the one that led to the question of what was himself.

"You see, he belonged to the Tinky Holloway faction. It was pretty much of a seesaw for a while, between the Tinky Holloway faction and the Chick Morrison faction. But we won. Tinky made a deal and agreed to scuttle his pal Bertram in exchange for a few things he needed from us. You should have heard Bertram howl! But he was a dead duck and he knew it."

He started on a rolling chuckle, but choked it off, as the haze cleared and he saw his wife's face. "Jim," she whispered, "is that the sort of . . . victories you're winning?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" he screamed, smashing his fist down on the table. "Where have you been all these years? What sort of world do you think you're living in?" His blow had upset his water glass and the water went spreading in dark stains over the lace of the tablecloth.

"I'm trying to find out," she whispered. Her shoulders were sagging and her face looked suddenly worn, an odd, aged look that seemed haggard and lost.

"I couldn't help it!" he burst out in the silence. "I'm not to blame! I have to take things as I find them! It's not I who've made this world!"

He was shocked to see that she smiled—a smile of so fiercely bitter a contempt that it seemed incredible on her gently patient face; she was not looking at him, but at some image of her own. "That's what my father used to say when he got drunk at the corner saloon instead of looking for work."

"How dare you try comparing me to—" he started, but did not finish, because she was not listening.

Her words, when she looked at him again, astonished him as completely irrelevant. "The date of that nationalization, September second," she asked, her voice wistful, "was it you who picked it?"

"No. I had nothing to do with it. It's the date of some special session of their legislature. Why?"

"It's the date of our first wedding anniversary."

"Oh? Oh, that's right!" He smiled, relieved at the change to a safe subject. "We'll have been married a year. My, it doesn't seem that long!"

"It seems much longer," she said tonelessly.

She was looking off again, and he felt in sudden uneasiness that the subject was not safe at all; he wished she would not look as if she were seeing the whole course of that year and of their marriage.

. . . not to get scared, but to learn—she thought—the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn . . . The words came from a sentence she had repeated to herself so often that it felt like a pillar polished smooth by the helpless weight of her body, the pillar that had supported her through the past year. She tried to repeat it, but she felt as if her hands were slipping on the polish, as if the sentence would not stave off terror any longer—because she was beginning to understand.

If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.

. . . It was in the bewildered loneliness of the first weeks of her marriage that she said it to herself for the first time. She could not understand Jim's behavior, or his sullen anger, which looked like weakness, or his evasive, incomprehensible answers to her questions, which sounded like cowardice; such traits were not possible in the James Taggart whom she had married. She told herself that she could not condemn without understanding, that she knew nothing about his world, that the extent of her ignorance was the extent to which she misinterpreted his actions. She took the blame, she took the beating of self reproach—against some bleakly stubborn certainty which told her that something was wrong and that the thing she felt was fear.

"I must learn everything that Mrs. James Taggart is expected to know and to be." was the way she explained her purpose to a teacher of etiquette. She set out to learn with the devotion, the discipline, the drive of a military cadet or a religious novice. It was the only way, she thought, of earning the height which her husband had granted her on trust, of living up to his vision of her, which it was now her duty to achieve. And, not wishing to confess it to herself, she felt also that at the end of the long task she would recapture her vision of him, that knowledge would bring back to her the man she had seen on the night of his railroad's triumph.

She could not understand Jim's attitude when she told him about her lessons. He burst out laughing; she was unable to believe that the laughter had a sound of malicious contempt. "Why, Jim? Why? What are you laughing at?" He would not explain—almost as if the fact of his contempt were sufficient and required no reasons.

She could not suspect him of malice: he was too patiently generous about her mistakes. He seemed eager to display her in the best drawing rooms of the city, and he never uttered a word of reproach for her ignorance, for her awkwardness, for those terrible moments when a silent exchange of glances among the guests and a burst of blood to her cheekbones told her that she had said the wrong thing again. He showed no embarrassment, he merely watched her with a faint smile.

When they came home after one of those evenings, his mood seemed affectionately cheerful. He was trying to make it easier for her, she thought—and gratitude drove her to study the harder.

She expected her reward on the evening when, by some imperceptible transition, she found herself enjoying a party for the first time. She felt free to act, not by rules, but at her own pleasure, with sudden confidence that the rules had fused into a natural habit—she knew that she was attracting attention, but now, for the first time, it was not the attention of ridicule, but of admiration—she was sought after, on her own merit, she was Mrs. Taggart, she had ceased being an object of charity weighing Jim down, painfully tolerated for his sake—she was laughing gaily and seeing the smiles of response, of appreciation on the faces around her—and she kept glancing at him across the room, radiantly, like a child handing him a report card with a perfect score, begging him to be proud of her. Jim sat alone in a corner, watching her with an undecipherable glance.