Becoming a d’Anconia (for real)

Atlas Shrugged – Day 011 – pp. 104-113

On the ride home, Dagny asked her mother,

“Mother, do they think it’s exactly in reverse?”
“What” Mrs Taggart asked bewildered
“The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?”
“Darling, what do you mean?”
“There wasn’t a person there who enjoyed it.” she said, her voice lifeless, “or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they seay anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant.”
“Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is siplysupposed to be gay.”
“How? By being stupid?”
“I mean, for instance, didn’t you enjoy meeting the young men?”
“What men? There wasn’t a man there I couldn’t squash ten of.”

A woman clearly in charge of her own destiny…

Now it’s the next summer and Dagny should be – by my count – 17 …

Francisco returns and she tells him all about the experience.   Now I think there’s an emotional bond forming.  Like they are actually siblings. From different parents but the same philosophical womb.

Then came the tennis match. I guess a little sexual tension on her part. She felt the need to beat him for once. She played as hard as she coul. Pain of exhaustion and all that. In the end she won and Francisco behaved in a suitably angry manner.

Later, at the end of a night shift on the Rockdale line, Francisco came to meet her at work. They started walking home. Made their way into a nearby woods. And finally… nearly 20 pages into the chapter… they’re rolling on the ground.  (Apparently back in the 50s, readers had much greater patience for getting to the sexy scenes…)

So the mutual attraction has turned physical and I suppose this has deepened their bond even further. According to Rand, the times they would spend in the woods “…were the only times she learned to feel a sense of beauty –”  (Yep.)

Moving on…  Francisco has gone on to Patrick Henry College (carefully selected by his father.) Yet he still comes to visit when he can.

Apparently his junior or senior year, he started taking extra classes and working in a foundry near Cleveland. Ooops.

“He started working at the foundry as a furnace boy, when he was sixteen — now, at twenty, he owned it.”

At twenty-three, Francisco’s father died and he moved back to Buenos Aires to take over the family business.

Some years later, when she was 24, she received a call from Francisco who was staying at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel.  He asked her to come for dinner.

“Dagny, don’t be astonished by anything I do” he said.  “Or by anything I may ever do in the future.”

That’s a bit of a sudden shift in attitude…