Atlas Shrugged – Day 038 – pp. 369-378
While she’s waiting she recalls all the incredible gifts he’s given her. . .
“The single pear shaped ruby that spurted a violent fire on the white satin of the jeweler’s box. It was a famous stone which only a dozen men in the world could properly afford to purchase; he was not one of them.”
“On the evening of a blizzard, she came home to find an enormous spread of tropical flowers standing in he living room against the dark glass of windows battered by snowflakes.”
“. . .he brought and put over her shoulders was a cape of blue fox that swallowed her from the curve of her chin to the tips of her sandals.”
Out for a secluded dinner one evening, he again confesses what he believes to be his sin.
“…it’s not that I want you to have them. I want you to have them from me . . . Do you under stand that it’s nothing but vicious self-indulgence on my part? I’m not doing it for your pleasure, but for mine.”
Of course she knows.
“I’ve always wanted to enjoy my wealth,” he said. “I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t even have time to know how much I wanted to.. . . I’ve never despised luxury,” he said, “yet, I’ve always despised those who enjoyed it. I looked at what they called their pleasures and it seemed so miserably senseless to me –”
“Dagny, look at those people. They’re supposed to be the playboys of life, the amusement-seekers and luxury-lovers. They sit there, waiting for this place to give them meaning, not the other way around. But they’re always shown to us as the enjoyers of material pleasures — and then we’re taught that the enjoyment of material pleasures is evil. Enjoyment? Are they enjoying it? Isn’t there some sort of perversion in what we’re taught, some error that’s vicious and very important?”
On his way to Dagny’s, Hank ponders the latest directive that will put nearly all his copper suppliers out of business within the year. The G has shifted it’s main dealings to one d’Anconia Copper importers.
It pisses him off. In part because he’s helpless to ACT against it. Big point. . .
“No matter how hard a struggle he had lived through in the past, he had never reached the ultimate ugliness of abandoning the will to act.”
It’s created in him a vision of the world as an ordinary man sees it. And he hates it.
When he gets to Dagny’s they speak briefly and she tells him about the meeting with Stadler and what she’s learned about the motor. Hank tells her she shouldn’t have seen him. Because all he wanted in her presence was to “juggle reality” for him and place him back in a position of importance. And only she could do it. Why?
Because she was the victim. The light’s going on for Hank. He recalls the Washington boy’s reaction when he told him to just go steal the RM ingots. Why should he have been afraid of the truth? The cards are all stacked in his favor.
He (the boy) needed legitimacy. And Hank (an honest man) was the only one who could give that legitimacy to a looter.
What he knew, what he had discovered tonight,was this his recaptured love of existence had not been given back to him by the return of his desire for her – but that the desire had returned after he had regained his world, the love, the value and the sense of his world –“
Maybe Hank’s coming around after all. End Chapter I