Part 1, Chapter 6, Section 2

After the party, Rearden spends an hour alone in his room before entering his wife’s bedroom late at night (p 157 s 162). She and her surroundings are a “decorator’s display of a lady groomed for sleep, not to be disturbed.” Rearden is still in his dress clothes, only “his tie was loose, and a strand of hair hung over his face.” She declares it is customary to talk — “If you wish.” — and rattles about household minutiae.

Rearden reflects on his sexual history. He had not known many women, as his dedication had swept aside “everything that did not pertain” to his work (p 158 s 162). Yet occasionally an “access of desire, so violent that it could not be given to a casual encounter” had caused him to surrender on “a few rare occasions” to “women he had thought he liked. He had been left feeling an angry emptiness — because he had sought an act of triumph, though he had not known of what nature, but the response he received was only a woman’s acceptance of a casual pleasure, and he knew too clearly that what he had won had no meaning.”

Rearden met Lillian during one of the “few social occasions to which he was invited by men who sought his favor” (p 158 s 162). She had planned her and Rearden’s meeting, “then faced him coldly, as if not caring that he knew it.” Rearden is attracted to this austerity — she was “obviously pursuing him but with obvious reluctance … as if fighting a desire she resented.” Rearden takes her to his mills one evening, and he notes “a soft, low, breathless tone — the tone of admiration — growing in her voice” (p 159 s 162). What he sees in her eyes when she sees “a heat of steel being poured, was like his own feeling for it made visible to him.” Rearden asks her to marry him that same evening.

It takes only a week of marriage for Rearden’s desire to die — and some time thereafter for him to admit to himself “this was torture” (p 159 s 162). Lillian “had never objected; she had never refused him anything; she submited whenever he wished. She submitted in the manner of complying with the rule that it was, at tie, her duty to become an inanimate object turned over to her husband’s use.” She was “condescendingly tolerant” of what she saw as the “degrading instincts” of a man. What remained for Rearden “was only a need which he was unable to destroy.”

On the evenings Rearden had sex with Lillian, she would set aside a book and “when he lay exhausted, his eyes closed, still breathing in gasps, she would turn on the light, pick up the book and continue her reading” (p 160 s 162). Rearden felt a “dreary, indifferent respect for her. His hatred of his own desire had made him accept the doctrine that women were pure and that a pure woman was one incapable of physical pleasure.” He had never entered a whorehouse — although “the self-loathing he would experience there could be no worse than what he felt when he was driven to enter his wife’s bedroom” — because he wants to protect from dishonor not Lillian, “but the person of his wife.”

This evening, Lillian talks with a “bright, crisp voice” while “polishing her fingernails” (p 160 s 162). She “knew why he had come here” and knew what her actions would do to him. Rearden turns away to avoid seeing her “lacquered chastity” — “what he thought he should feel was respect; what he felt was revulsion.” Rearden wonders why she married him: she had a “driving purpose within her” but nothing to condemn; she kept to her own friends; and she spent little money. “She was a woman of honor in their marriage. She wanted nothing material from him. … What was she after? In the universe as he knew it, there was no answer.” (p 161 s 162) Rearden orders Lillian to not invite who she thinks are his friends to another party because he does not care to meet them socially. Lillian “laughed, startled and pleased” and remarks “I don’t blame you” before Rearden leaves without another word.