The Fountainhead

"Why speak in terms of years?" said Guy Francon. "Those modernistic stunts never last more than a season. The owner will get good and sick of it and he'll come ru

The Heller house acquired fame throughout the countryside surrounding it. People drove out of their way to park on the road before it, to stare, point and giggle. Gas-station attendants snickered when Heller's car drove past. Heller's cook had to endure the derisive glances of shopkeepers when she went on her errands. The Heller house was known in the neighborhood as "The Booby Hatch."

Peter Keating told his friends in the profession, with an indulgent smile: "Now, now, you shouldn't say that about him. I've known Howard Roark for a long time, and he's got quite a talent, quite. He's even worked for me once. He's just gone haywire on that house. He'll learn. He has a future ... Oh, you don't think he has? You really don't think he has?"

Ellsworth M. Toohey, who let no stone spring from the ground of America without his comment, did not know that the Heller house had been erected, as far as his column was concerned. He did not consider it necessary to inform his readers about it, if only to damn it. He said nothing.

12.

A COLUMN entitled "Observations and Meditations" by Alvah Scarret appeared daily on the front page of the New York Ba

It was Alvah Scarret who conceived the idea of the campaign against living conditions in the slums and "Landlord Sharks," which ran in the Ba

The Wynand papers could not be left without a campaign for long. They had just concluded one on the subject of modern aviation. They had run scientific accounts of the history of aviation in the Sunday Family Magazine supplement, with pictures ranging from Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of flying machines to the latest bomber; with the added attraction of Icarus writhing in scarlet flames, his nude body blue-green, his wax wings yellow and the smoke purple; also of a leprous hag with flaming eyes and a crystal ball, who had predicted in the XIth century that man would fly; also of bats, vampires and werewolves.

They had run a model plane construction contest; it was open to all boys under the age of ten who wished to send in three new subscriptions to the Ba

Later, at the start of the slum campaign, Gail Wynand had said to Alvah Scarret; "Go ahead. Squeeze all you can out of the thing," and had departed on his yacht for a world cruise, accompanied by an enchanting aviatrix of twenty-four to whom he had made a present of his transcontinental plane.

Alvah Scarret went ahead. Among many other steps of his campaign he assigned Dominique Francon to investigate the condition of homes in the slums and to gather human material. Dominique Francon had just returned from a summer in Biarritz; she always took a whole summer's vacation and Alvah Scarret granted it, because she was one of his favorite employees, because he was baffled by her and because he knew that she could quit her job whenever she pleased.

Dominique Francon went to live for two weeks in the hall bedroom of an East-Side tenement. The room had a skylight, but no windows; there were five flights of stairs to climb and no ru

She wore frayed skirts and blouses. The abnormal fragility of her normal appearance made her look exhausted with privation in these surroundings; the neighbors felt certain that she had TB. But she moved as she had moved in the drawing room of Kiki Holcombe — with the same cold poise and confidence. She scrubbed the floor of her room, she peeled potatoes, she bathed in a tin pan of cold water. She had never done these things before; she did them expertly. She had a capacity for action, a competence that clashed incongruously with her appearance. She did not mind this new background; she was indifferent to the slums as she had been indifferent to the drawing rooms.

At the end of two weeks she returned to her penthouse apartment on the roof of a hotel over Central Park, and her articles on life in the slums appeared in the Ba

She heard baffled questions at a di

"Dominique, you didn't really live in that place?"

"Oh, yes," she answered. "The house you own on East Twelfth Street, Mrs. Palmer," she said, her hand circling lazily from under the cuff of an emerald bracelet too broad and heavy for her thin wrist, "has a sewer that gets clogged every other day and runs over, all through the courtyard. It looks blue and purple in the sun, like a rainbow."

"The block you control for the Claridge estate, Mr. Brooks, has the most attractive stalactites growing on all the ceilings," she said, her golden head leaning to her corsage of white gardenias with drops of water sparkling on the lusterless petals.

She was asked to speak at a meeting of social workers. It was an important meeting, with a militant, radical mood, led by some of the most prominent women in the field. Alvah Scarret was pleased and gave her his blessing. "Go to it, kid," he said, "lay it on thick. We want the social workers." She stood in the speaker's pulpit of an unaired hall and looked at a flat sheet of faces, faces lecherously eager with the sense of their own virtue. She spoke evenly, without inflection. She said, among many other things: "The family on the first floor rear do not bother to pay their rent, and the children ca