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.
