As Part Two begins, Howard Roark has closed his office and is working in a granite quarry owned by Guy Francon in Connecticut. Dominique Francon vacations that summer at her father’s nearby estate. Visiting the quarry, Dominique meets Roark. Stirred by the taut lines of Roark’s body, the proud, scornful demeanor of his face, Dominique pursues him. She comes to the quarry, where the workers engage in inhuman toil in the terrible heat. She wears a dress the color of water, a pale green-blue that flaunts the coolness of the gardens and drawing rooms from which she comes. She stresses her beauty and her name to Roark, the red-headed worker who stares at her insolently. His look says that he not only has the right to stare at her with arrogance and unspoken intimacy, but that she has given him that right. Dominique is angry but terrified that she has no control over the feelings this nameless worker arouses in her. She returns repeatedly to the quarry. Roark, despite being tired from the unspeakably hard labor, is attracted to this haughty and beautiful young woman.
Dominique, attempting to break the power she feels Roark has over her, stays away from him. But the safety of her home lacks the tense excitement he gives her; she flails at the white marble fireplace in her bedroom with a hammer and succeeds in scratching it; then she demands that he fix it. Roark looks at it, realizes what she has done, and breaks it with one blow of his hammer. “Now it’s broken and has to be replaced,” he tells her. He has it taken out and orders a new piece of marble from Alabama. Dominique waits for the marble to come “with the feverish intensity of a sudden mania; she counted the days; she watched the rare trucks on the road beyond the lawn.” When the stone arrives, she barely glances at it. She sends to the quarry for the red-headed worker to come and set it. But Roark sends another worker in his place, and Dominique is enraged. She crosses paths with him several days later while riding her horse. When she asks why he didn’t set the stone, Roark replies that he thought it made no difference to her who set the stone—but obviously it does. She lashes him across the face with her riding crop and rides away.
Three days later, Dominique still has not seen Roark. She sits alone at her dressing table late at night. She presses her fingertips, wet with perfume, to her temples, seeking relief in the cold bite of the liquid on her skin. She thinks she should try to sleep. Dominique does not hear the sounds of footsteps outside, even though the French windows of her bedroom are open to the garden. She hears the footsteps only as they rise up the stairs to her terrace. She looks at the French windows; Roark enters. Dominique resists him physically, but Roark refuses to relent. Although her servants are nearby, she refuses to scream. She is not certain whether, in the first instant of feeling his skin against hers, she thrust her elbows at his throat trying to escape or “whether she lay still in his arms.” This was “the thing she had thought about, had expected, had never known to be like this, could not have known because this . . . was the kind of rapture she had wanted.” Their resulting lovemaking is so passionate that “it was not part of living, but a thing one could not bear longer than a second.” When Roark leaves, not a word has been spoken between them. Dominique feels that she must bathe. When she looks at herself in the bathroom mirror, she sees the purple bruises left on her body by his mouth and she moans: “She knew that she would not take a bath. She knew that she wanted to keep the feel of his body, the traces of his body on hers, knowing also what such a desire implied.” Rather than wash away her lover’s touch, she lays all night on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. As for Roark, when Roger Enright recalls him to New York to design the Enright House, he thinks of Dominique even then. Architecture is no longer the sole mistress of his soul.
Roger Enright is a hard-bitten entrepreneur who began his working life as a coal miner in Pennsylvania. A self-made man, no one had helped him on his way to becoming a millionaire. That, he says, is why no one ever stood in his way. He never bought a share of stock or sold a share in any of his enterprises. He holds his fortune single-handed, “as simply as if he carried all his cash in his pocket.” He owns an oil business, a publishing house, a restaurant, a radio shop, a garage, and a refrigerator-manufacturing plant. Before venturing into a field, he studies it for a long time, then acts as if he’s never heard of any of the field’s accepted wisdom. Enright’s innovative ventures sometimes fail but often succeed, and he runs them all with the same ferocious energy, working twelve hours a day. Roark’s work on the Enright House brings not only recognition but also more work.
