The Stoddard Temple is Dominique's worst fear realized. Roark designs a masterpiece that the world, in its evil and its ignorance, destroys. Her suffering is far worse than his. She comes to his room on the evening that Stoddard announces his lawsuit. She says nothing, but Roark knows at a glance what she feels, and that she feels it for him. "'You're wrong,' he said. They could always speak like this to each other, continuing a conversation they had not begun. His voice was gentle. 'I don't feel that.'" This dialogue between lovers illustrates that their intimacy is such that a wordless glance suffices to inform each of the other's deepest thoughts and emotions. Roark knows that despite Dominique's marriage to Keating, he will not lose her. They are bound to each other by deeper ties than a wedding vow.
Dominique marries Keating as an act of spiritual anesthesia. It is her idealism — her commitment to Roark and to all manifestations of human stature — that condemns her to suffering in a world that rejects her values. She seeks to kill off in herself (or at least put to sleep) her capacity to respond to sights of man's greatness. Keating is an unprincipled man, utterly devoid of the noble values that Dominique treasures. By immersing herself in Keating's life — by being a dutiful wife, by arranging his social calendar, by smiling at men of influence, by sleeping with him — she seeks to lose her attitude of man-worship. Dominique, a woman capable of loving only the equivalents of Michelangelo, in unbearable pain living in a world that repudiates such exalted standards, seeks to rid her spirit of its capacity for reverence by filling her life with the individual least deserving of it. But, as Nietzsche said, nobility of soul "is not to be lost." Dominique's quest is hopeless. Her reverence for man's greatness is the essence of her soul; it is ineradicable. This is the deepest reason that Roark cannot lose her.
