When Dominique and Wynand return from the cruise, she is still married to Keating. Wynand buys Keating’s consent to a divorce with a signed contract for the Stoneridge project and a check for a quarter of a million dollars. Keating, humiliated by his own lack of backbone, collects his group of friends and takes them out drinking. Keating is eager to pay for everything and gives exorbitant tips. As they consume the liquor, Keating asks repeatedly, “We’re friends—aren’t we friends?” His comrades nod in agreement. The blurred eyes looking back at him are soft and comforting.
Before leaving for Reno to obtain a divorce, Dominique visits Steven Mallory at his home. She has not seen Roark for twenty months. Once in a while during this period, she has called on Mallory. He understood that those rare evenings were moments in which she ached for a sight of her homeland, and that she could permit herself just a few of those moments. Entering Mallory’s studio after a lengthy absence, Dominique observes the sudden prosperity reflected in his new possessions and realizes it is a result of Wynand’s patronage—that Wynand, after examining the statue of Dominique, desired other works by the same sculptor and chose only the best. Though Mallory has purchased various new artworks, Dominique observes that his walls are bare. He has added no paintings. A single sketch hangs over his studio—Roark’s original drawing of the Stoddard Temple. When they are seated side by side, he tells her what she desires to know without her asking. Roark is in Clayton, Ohio, constructing a new building for Janer’s Department Store. He tells her it is five stories tall and located on Main Street; Roark has been there for about a month.
On her way to Reno, Dominique gets off the train in Clayton, Ohio. She arrives in the evening, and, after asking directions, walks to Main Street. She walks until she reaches the glare of an excavation site. The workers are working late. When Roark comes up to the street he sees Dominique. Noticing the expression on her face, he says, “You’d better sit down.” He takes her suitcase and guides her to the steps of a vacant house across the street. She questions him about his room and the restaurants in which he eats. She asks him if people look at him as he sits at a lunch counter or walks down the street., and he tells her they do not. Because Dominique is still afraid of sharing him with lunch wagons and people on the street, Roark realizes that she has not come to stay. She says that the two country homes he’s done in the past two years—one in Pennsylvania and the other near Boston—were “unimportant” buildings. “Inexpensive,” he corrects her, but interesting to design. She says that what he has been working on is like the quarry all over again; that it is a major comedown—after the Enright House and the Cord Building—to build five-story structures for the rest of his life. Dominique tells Roark that she is going to Reno to obtain a divorce from Keating, and that she will then marry Gail Wynand. He thinks of Henry Cameron and his warning that the Wynand papers and everything they stand for is the symbol of their opposition. But Roark does not try to stop her. Suddenly, Dominique blurts out that she wants to live in this town with him; to have a small home that she will keep; that he will give up architecture; that they will live only for their love for each other, and nothing more. He answers that, were he cruel, he would accept, if only to see how long it would be before she begged him to return to architecture. When he walks her to the train station, he tells her their separation will last until she learns not to notice the contrast between him and the rest of society, until she learns not to be tormented by his struggle to succeed on his own terms. She boards the train and departs for Reno.
Dominique marries Wynand. Over the first months of their marriage she sees the best within him—his creative drive and his love of mankind’s noblest accomplishments. Gradually, despite her contempt for his pandering, she comes to respect his virtues and to care for him. She warns him against Ellsworth Toohey’s schemes to take over The Banner, but he merely laughs contemptuously. She tells him to go after Toohey and to destroy him. She points out that he doesn’t understand Toohey, doesn’t see that Toohey’s real goal is to control the Wynand papers as a means of controlling the world. But Wynand knows that Toohey could not create The Banner, that he is incapable of such a feat, and he cannot conceive of Toohey as a threat to him or the world. He believes Dominique suffers from a “horror complex,” and contemptuously dismisses the idea that Toohey could gain control of The Banner.
