ON A SPRING DAY, EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER, DOMINIQUE WALKED to the construction site of the Wynand Building.

She looked at the skyscrapers of the city. They rose from unexpected spots, out of the low roof lines. They had a kind of startling suddenness, as if they had sprung up the second before she saw them and she had caught the last thrust of the motion; as if, were she to turn away and look again fast enough, she would catch them in the act of springing.

She turned a corner of Hell’s Kitchen and came to the vast cleared tract.

Machines were crawling over the torn earth, grading the future park. From its center, the skeleton of the Wynand Building rose, completed, to the sky. The top part of the frame still hung naked, an intercrossed cage of steel. Glass and masonry had followed its rise, covering the rest of the long streak slashed through space.

She thought: They say the heart of the earth is made of fire. It is held imprisoned and silent. But at times it breaks through the clay, the iron, the granite, and shoots out to freedom. Then it becomes a thing like this.

She walked to the building. A wooden fence surrounded its lower stories. The fence was bright with large signs advertising the names of the firms who had supplied materials for the tallest structure in the world. “Steel by National Steel, Inc.” “Glass by Ludlow.” “Electrical Equipment by Wells-Clairmont.” “Elevators by Kessler, Inc.” “Nash & Dunning, Contractors.”

She stopped. She saw an object she had never noticed before. The sight was like the touch of a hand on her forehead, the hand of those figures in legend who had the power to heal. She had not known Henry Cameron and she had not heard him say it, but what she felt now was as if she were hearing it: “And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world—and never wins acknowledgment. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer.”

She saw, on the fence surrounding New York’s greatest building, a small tin plate bearing the words:“Howard Roark, Architect”

She walked to the superintendent’s shed. She had come here often to call for Roark, to watch the progress of construction. But there was a new man in the shed who did not know her. She asked for Roark.

“Mr. Roark is way up on top by the water tank. Who’s calling, ma’am?”

“Mrs. Roark,” she answered.

The man found the superintendent who let her ride the outside hoist, as she always did—a few planks with a rope for a railing, that rose up the side of the building.

She stood, her hand lifted and closed about a cable, her high heels posed firmly on the planks. The planks shuddered, a