The Fountainhead

"This is different. I don't like it when there's a system behind it, a kind of special purpose, like a lot of little trickles dribbling along, all i

"Getting a persecution mania, Alvah?"

"I don't like it. It was all right when people took cracks at his yachts and women and a few municipal election scandals — which were never proved," he added hastily. "But I don't like it when it's that new intelligentsia slang that people seem to be going for nowadays: Gail Wynand, the exploiter, Gail Wynand, the pirate of capitalism, Gail Wynand, the disease of an era. It's still crap, Ellsworth, only there's dynamite in that kind of crap."

"It's just the modern way of saying the same old things, nothing more. Besides, I can't be responsible for the policy of a magazine just because I sell them an article once in a while."

"Yeah, but ... That's not what I hear."

"What do you hear?"

"I hear you're financing the damn thing."

"Who, me? With what?"

"Well, not you yourself exactly. But I hear it was you who got young Ro

"Hell, that was just to save Ro

"Yeah, but you could've attached a little string to the gift, slipped word to the editors that they'd better lay off Gail or else."

"The New Frontiers is not the Ba

"In this game, Ellsworth? Whom are you kidding?"

"Well, if it will set your mind at rest, I'll tell you something you haven't heard. It's not supposed to be known — it was done through a lot of proxies. Did you know that I just got Mitchell Layton to buy a nice fat chunk of the Ba

"No!"

"Yes."

"Christ, Ellsworth, that's great! Mitchell Layton? We can use a reservoir like that and ... Wait a minute. Mitchell Layton?"

"Yes. What's wrong with Mitchell Layton?"

"Isn't he the little boy who couldn't digest grandpaw's money?"

"Grandpaw left him an awful lot of money."

"Yeah, but he's a crackpot. He's the one who's been a Yogi, then a vegetarian, then a Unitarian, then a nudist — and now he's gone to build a palace of the proletariat in Moscow."

"So what?"

"But Jesus! — a Red among our stockholders?"

"Mitch isn't a Red. How can one be a Red with a quarter of a billion dollars? He's just a pale tea-rose. Mostly yellow. But a nice kid at heart."

"But — on the Ba

"Alvah, you're an ass. Don't you see? I've made him put some dough into a good, solid, conservative paper. That'll cure him of his pink notions and set him in the right direction. Besides, what harm can he do? Your dear Gail controls his papers, doesn't he?"

"Does Gail know about this?"

"No. Dear Gail hasn't been as watchful in the last five years as he used to be. And you'd better not tell him. You see the way Gail's going. He'll need a little pressure. And you'll need the dough. Be nice to Mitch Layton. He can come in handy."

"That's so."

"It is. You see? My heart's in the right place. I've helped a puny little liberal mag like the New Frontiers, but I've also brought a much more substantial hunk of cash to a big stronghold of arch-conservatism such as the New York Ba

"So you have. Damn decent of you, too, considering that you're a kind of radical yourself."

"Now are you going to talk about any disloyalty?"

"Guess not. Guess you'll stand by the old Ba

"Of course I will. Why, I love the Ba

8.

WALKING the soil of a desert island holds one anchored to the rest of the earth; but in their penthouse, with the telephone disco

For two weeks after their wedding they never left the penthouse. She could have pressed the button of the elevator and broken these weeks any time she wished; she did not wish it. She had no desire to resist, to wonder, to question. It was enchantment and peace.

He sat talking to her for hours when she wanted. He was content to sit silently, when she preferred, and look at her as he looked at the objects in his art gallery, with the same distant, undisturbing glance. He answered any question she put to him. He never asked questions. He never spoke of what he felt. When she wished to be alone, he did not call for her. One evening she sat reading in her room and saw him standing at the frozen parapet of the dark roof garden outside, not looking back at the house, only standing in the streak of light from her window.

When the two weeks ended, he went back to his work, to the office of the Ba

He never mentioned it, but she knew that he did not want her to step out of the house, neither with him nor alone. It was a quiet obsession which he did not expect to enforce. When he came home, he asked: "Have you been out?" — never: "Where have you been?" It was not jealousy — the "where" did not matter. When she wanted to buy a pair of shoes, he had three stores send a collection of shoes for her choice — it prevented her visit to a store. When she said she wanted to see a certain picture, he had a projection room built on the roof.

She obeyed, for the first few months. When she realized that she loved their isolation, she broke it at once. She made him accept invitations and she invited guests to their house. He complied without protest.

But he maintained a wall she could not break — the wall he had erected between his wife and his newspapers. Her name never appeared in their pages. He stopped every attempt to draw Mrs. Gail Wynand into public life — to head committees, sponsor charity drives, endorse crusades. He did not hesitate to open her mail — if it bore an official letterhead that betrayed its purpose — to destroy it without answer and to tell her that he had destroyed it. She shrugged and said nothing.

Yet he did not seem to share her contempt for his papers. He did not allow her to discuss them. She could not discover what he thought of them, nor what he felt. Once, when she commented on an offensive editorial, he said coldly:

"I've never apologized for the Ba

"But this is really awful, Gail."

"I thought you married me as the publisher of the Ba

"I thought you didn't like to think of that."

"What I like or dislike doesn't concern you. Don't expect me to change the Ba

She laughed. "I wouldn't ask it, Gail."

He did not laugh in answer.

In his office in the Ba