Part 1, Chapter 5, Section 2

Dagny walks to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel to see Francisco d’Anconia (p 90 s 152). A childhood flashback ensues to the annual summer month that Francisco spent at the Taggart estate (p 90 s 152), a practice that began when Dagny was 9 and Francisco was 11 (p 91 s 152). To Francisco “the Taggart children were not Jim and Dagny, but Dagny and Eddie. He seldom volunteered to notice Jim’s existence.” (p 90 s 152). However, Francisco did once explain to James Taggart that being a d’Anconia was not merely a name: “None of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d’Anconia. We are expected to become one.” (p 90-91) On the topic of names, Dagny and Francisco nicknamed each other, a practice they resented only initially (p 91 s 152). Dagny was Slug; when she angrily asks Francisco’s meaning by this, he responded, “In case you don’t know it, ‘Slug’ means a great fire in a locomotive firebox.” Francisco was Frisco; it was Dagny’s retaliation.

Dagny and Eddie spent winters trying to master some new skill so when Francisco returned they could “beat him, for once” — but “they never succeeded” (p 92 s 152). Francisco showed his prowess at baseball when he observed Dagny and Eddie for a few minutes, then “took the bat and sent the ball flying over a line of oak trees at the far end of the field” (p 93 s 152). Another time, Dagny, Eddie and Francisco are watching from the shore as James clumsily tries to drive a motorboat for the first time. When the motorboat is disembarked, Francisco hops on and, behind the wheel of a motorboat the first time, sends it “out to the middle of the river, as if fired from a gun.” Mr. Taggart eyes Francisco speed away with the same look as when he discovered that a 12 year old Francisco — with just two years of algebra education — had independently developed a crude differential equation whilst designing a pulley system for an elevator.

Eyeing the the triumvirate from a distance, James watched Francisco with “a peculiar kind of intensity” (p 94 s 152). Rarely uttering a word in Francisco’s presence, James instead derisively cornered Dagny. “All those airs you put on, pretending that you’re an iron woman with a mind of your own! You’re a spineless dishrag, that’s all you are. … You haven’t any pride at all. The way you run when he whistles and wait on him! Why don’t you shine his shoes?” “Because he hasn’t told me to.” Dagny and Eddie are Francisco’s only friends, although “they could not tell whether they owned him or were owned by him completely; it made no difference; either concept made them happy” (p 94-95 s 152).

During his second summer at the Taggart estate, in addition to his elevator project, Francisco began to vanish each morning until lunchtime (p 92 s 152). A worried Mrs. Taggart investigates and finds Francisco working incognito as Frankie at a Taggart Transcontinental division point ten miles away. Mrs. Taggart terminates his “unofficial deal with the dispatcher” at once on grounds that he does not have parental permission to work. The dispatcher is sad to lose “the best call boy they ever had” and fruitlessly asks, “Maybe we could make a deal with his parents?” Back at the Taggart estate, Mrs. Taggart, James and Dagny each query Francisco (p 92 s 152). Mrs. Taggart asks what Francisco’s father would say. “My father would ask whether I was good at the job or not. … Last winter … I shipped out … on a cargo steamer … my father looked for me for three months, but that’s all he asked me when I came back.” James Taggart smiles with the “triumph of finding cause to feel contempt” and asks Francisco if his winters are usually as such. Francisco’s pleasant, innocent and casual tone does not change, “That was last winter … The winter before last I spent in Madrid, at the home of the Duke of Alba.” Dagny asks Francisco why he wanted to work on a railroad. “To learn what it’s like, Slug … and to tell you that I’ve had a job with Taggart Transcontinental before you did.”

During his fifth summer at the Taggart estate, Francisco, Dagny and Eddie walked through the woods (p 95 s 152). At only 15 years old, Francisco says, “Dagny, I’ll always bow to a coat-of-arms. I’ll always worship the symbols of nobility. Am I not supposed to be an aristocrat? Only I don’t give a damn for moth-eaten turrets and tenth-hand unicorns. The coats-of-arms of our day are to be found on billboards and in the ads of popular magazines.” Eddie asks Francisco’s meaning. “Industrial trademarks, Eddie.”

When Francisco concluded his sixth summer at the Taggart estate, Dagny “thought that his departure was like the crossing of a frontier which ended his childhood: he was to start college, that fall. Her turn would come next. She felt an eager impatience touched by the excitement of fear, as if he had leaped into an unknown danger. It was like the moment, years ago, when she had seen him dive first from a rock into the Hudson, had seen him vanish under the black water and had stood, knowing he would reappear in an instant and that it would then be her turn to follow.” (p 97 s 152) Yet Dagny was haunted by a remark she heard once about Francisco, “That boy is vulnerable. He has too great a capacity for joy. What will he do with it in a world where there’s so little occasion for it?” (p 97-98 s 152) The words stirred apprehension as a warning would, yet Dagny dismissed them because to her Francisco was proof that the “world she saw ahead was real, even though it was not the world of those around her” (p 98 s 152).

Dagny and Francisco do not communicate at all while he is away at college; “she knew he would come back to the country for one summer month” (p 98 s 152). At the start of Francisco’s seventh Taggart summer, Dagny and Francisco share a moment’s look not of “greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day that year”. As they walk, “she felt that there was a new reticence between them which, strangely, was a new kind of intimacy” (p 99 s 152).

Later, while Dagny (now 15) and Francisco (now 17) are alone in a forest, Dagny wonders “why she was so aware of her enjoyment, of her movements, of her body in the process of walking. She did not want to look at Francisco. She felt that his presence seemed more intensely real when she kept her eyes away from him, almost as if the stressed awareness of herself came from him, like the sunlight from the water.” (p 99-100 s 152) Francisco declaring, “Let me see how far you’ll rise with Taggart Transcontinental” (p 100 s 152) “Why do you think that I care to prove anything to you?” “Want me to answer?” “No.” Francisco chuckles before stating,

Dagny feels like she and Francisco are “the only ones who seem to know it” — something which Dagny cares at all about because, “I like to understand things, and there’s something about people that I can’t understand” (p 100 s 152). “What?” “I’ve always been unpopular in school and it didn’t bother me, but now I’ve discovered the reason. It’s an impossible kind of reason. They dislike me, not because I do things badly, but because I do them well. They dislike me because I’ve always had the best grades in the class. I don’t even have to study. I always get A’s. Do you suppose I should try to get D’s for a change and become the most popular girl in school?” Francisco stopped, looked at Dagny and slapped her.

The next summer, Dagny (16) tells Francisco (18) that she has begun working as a night operator for Taggart Transcontinental (p 101 s 152). “All right, Taggart Transcontinental, now it’s a race. Let’s see who’ll do greater honor, you — to Nat Taggart, or I — to Sebastián d’Anconia.”

The flashbacks of the Taggart summers melt away to allow exposition of the relationship between Dagny and her mother. Mrs. Taggart felt she had no chance to “form some conception of her own daughter” as Dagny was only a “slim figure in a leather jacket, with a raised collar, a short skirt and long show-girl legs” who hurried in and out (p 102 s 152). What left Mrs. Taggart in “unhappy bewilderment” however was that “Dagny showed no romantic inclination whatsoever” (p 101 s 152). When she once asked Dagny if she ever wanted to have a good time, Dagny incredulously answered, “What do you think I’m having?”

It was thus an astonished relief to Mrs. Taggart when Dagny agreed with “inexplicable eagerness, for once like a child” to have a “formal debut” to New York society at the Wayne-Falkland (p 102 s 152). A second astonishment occurred when Dagny was dressed for the party; she looked not like “a preposterous contrast” but “like a beauty.” Mrs. Taggart “had an artist’s taste” and the decoration of the Wayne-Falkland ballroom that evening “was her masterpiece” (p 103 s 152). When Mrs. Taggart points out the minutiae — “Lights, colors, flowers, music. They’re not as negligible as you might think.” — Dagny responds, “I’ve never thought they’re negligible.” Mrs. Taggart for once feels a bond with Dagny, as Dagny looks at her mother “with a child’s grateful trust.”

By the end of the evening Mrs. Taggart feels less than relieved. Dagny’s face is “contemptuously empty” while she sits “as if she were dressed in slacks” and talks with “helpless young men” (p 103 s 152). Mrs. Taggart nor Dagny say a word to each other until hours later when Mrs. Taggart visits Dagny’s room. Dagny’s face reveals only “puzzled helplessness” and Mrs. Taggart wishes she had not hoped for her daughter to discovered sadness. “Mother, do they think it’s exactly in reverse. … The lights and the flowers. Do the expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around? … There wasn’t a person there who enjoyed it … or who felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant.” “One is simply supposed to be gay.” “By being stupid?” “Didn’t you enjoy meeting the young men?” “There wasn’t a man there I couldn’t squash ten of.” (p 103-104 s 152)

The literary spotlight shifts to Francisco’s next summer at the Taggart estate. One evening, Dagny interrupts a long silence between her and Francisco by leaving too early for work (p 104 s 152). “Hurrying angrily up the slope to the house, she wondered what had made her leave; she did not know; it had been a sudden restlessness that came from a feeling she did not identify till now: a feeling of expectation.” Francisco tosses her a mocking glance of the kind “he reserved for others, a glance that seemed to see too much.”

Dagny sees the same glance again when she and Francisco are playing tennis (p 104 s 152). They played often and he always won, but at some point earlier in the game Dagny had decided to win and she was left with a “quiet fury rising within her.”

Francisco visited Dagny unexpectedly that night while she worked alone at Rockdale (p 106 s 152). He sat in a corner — “one leg thrown over the arm of his chair” — and waited. “She worked swiftly, feeling inordinately clear-headed … but when a thin sheet of paper fluttered down to the floor and she bent to pick it up, she was suddenly as intently conscious of that particular moment, of herself and her own movement. … She felt her heart stop causelessly in the kind of gasp one feels in moments of anticipation. She picked up the paper and turned back to her desk.”

When the day operator arrived, Dagny and Francisco took an old forest trail back to the Taggart estate (p 107 s 152). They stop at a clearing and Francisco seizes Dagny — “she knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. … She tried to pull herself away, but she only leaned back against his arms long enough to see his face and his smile, the smile that told her she had given him permission long ago. She thought that she must escape; instead, it was she who pulled his head down to find his mouth again.”

Dagny and Francisco continue to meet that sumer “in the woods, in hidden corners by the river, on the floor of an abandoned shack, in the cellar of the house” and even during the winter when Francisco would omit an evening from his studies to take Dagny to his Manhattan apartment (p 108-109 s 152). Francisco “taught her every manner of sensuality he could invent. … They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin.” It is only while having sex with Francisco that Dagny “learned to feel a sense of beauty” — yet Dagny and Francisco keep their sex a secret “not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone’s right of debate or appraisal.”

Dagny would brag to Francisco about her Taggart Transcontinental employment, while Francisco was ordered by his father not to work for d’Anconia until after college (p 109 s 152). Yet after Francisco (20 yo) graduates — and after a Buenos Aires visit to see his father — he heads straight to New York and tells Dagny that he has been working in a copper foundry while attending college and now owns it. “He showed her a photograph of the foundry. It was a small, grimy place, disreputable with age, battered by years of a losing struggle; above its entrance gate, like a new flag on the mast of a derelict, hung the sign: d’Anconia Copper.” (p 110 s 152)

Dagny and Francisco see each other rarely and randomly after his college graduation in fall, when he left for Montana as assistant superintendent of a d’Anconia mine (p 110 s 152). “She liked it, because it made him a continuous presence in her life, like the ray of a hidden light that could hit her at any moment.” By spring Francisco was head of the New York office of d’Anconia Copper, driving his business with the same “smooth, dangerous, confidently mastered speed” as when he drove the motorboat at age 12. Yet at one point Dagny was shocked,

When Francisco inherits d’Anconia Copper at age 23, he writes brief notes to Dagny until calling for her during a spring day 3 years later (p 111 s 152). When she enters his hotel room that evening,

Dagny feels “certain of nothing except that she must not ask questions” and they greet with nothing but greetings and a kiss (p 112 s 152. They do not utter “the words they had never said to each other — even though they knew that both had said and heard them in that moment.”

At dinner that evening and with no “transition or warning, he asked, his voice oddly unstressed, ‘Dagny, what would you say if I asked you to leave Taggart Transcontinental and let it go to hell, as it will when your brother takes over?” (p 113 s 152) Dagny angrily responds she would say the same thing as if he had asked her to commit suicide.

In bed that evening, Francisco has a breakdown and cries “I can’t give it up! … Dagny! Help me to remain. To refuse. Even though he’s right! … It’s right, but so hard to do! … I can’t refuse.” (p 114 s 152) To avoid screaming, Dagny asks slowly what he means. Francisco tells her to go to sleep. In the morning she asks when she’ll see him again,

After a year of hearing “nothing from him or about him” Dagny is left in disbelief by the gossip she hears and reads,

Dagny “fought it. She recovered. Years helped her to reach the day when she could face her memories indifferently, then the day when she felt no necessity to face them. It was finished and of no concern to her any longer.” (p 116 s 152) She “had no other men in her life” and instead had the “clean, brilliant sense” of her work. Dagny “won the battle against her memories. But one form of torture remained, untouched by the years, the torture of the word ‘why?’”

Dagny enters Francisco’s hotel room to see him privately for the first time in twelve years. “Hi, Slug!” (p 117 s 152) She answers irresistibly, helplessly, happily, “Hi, Frisco!” Then she continues — “I came here to ask you a question. … When you told those reporters that you came to New York to witness the farce, which farce did you mean?” (p 118 s 152) She is talking about the San Sebastián disaster and continues — now in the “solemn, merciless tone of a prosecutor” — “You did it consciously, cold-bloddedly and with full intention. … You knew the San Sebastián mines were worthless … You knew it before you began the whole wretched business. … You knew, before you brought that property, that Mexico was in the hands of a looters’ government. You didn’t have to start a mining project for them. What you were after is your American stockholders. … I came here because I wanted you to know that I am beginning to understand your purpose. … You had exhausted every other form of depravity and sought a new thrill by swindling people like Jim and his friends, in order to watch them squirm. I don’t know what sort of corruption could make anyone enjoy that, but that’s what you came to New York to see, at the right time. … They’re rotten fools but in this case their only crime was that they trusted you. They trusted your name and your honor. … And you find it amusing?” (p 119-120 s 152) Francisco does not find it amusing. “No. … They knew nothing about making money. They did not think it necessary to learn. They considered knowledge superfluous and judgment inessential. They observed that there I was in the world and that I made it my honor to know. They thought they could trust me honor. One does not betray a trust of this kind, does one?” (p 120 s 152) “Then you did betray it intentionally?” “That’s for you to decide. …

Francisco continues to describe that the $8 million housing settlement he built was just “mainly cardboard” and everything else was built with scrap from “city dumps of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro” (p 123 s 152). None could last more than a few months to a year, except the church — “they’ll need it.” Dagny demands, “You, of all men, you should fight them! … The looters, and those who make world-looting possible. The Mexican planners and their kind.” Francisco responds, “No, my dear. It’s you that I have to fight.” Dagny does not understand.

Dagny takes a moment to recover her eyesight from the blasphemy of what Francisco calls a tribute (p 125 s 152). As she leaves, her eyes lock with Francisco’s — he wants to sleep with her but is “not a man who is happy enough to do it” (p 126 s 152). She admits to wanting to sleep with him as well, causing him to respond, “You have a great deal of courage, Dagny. Some day, you’ll have enough of it.” He fails to clarify of what she’ll have enough.