The Fountainhead: Part 2: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

Stoddard wins the case, and Roark is ordered to pay the costs of the Temple’s alterations. Stoddard is turning it into a home for subnormal children. 

Dominique wants to publish most of her court testimony in her column for the Banner, but Alvah Scarret says they can’t print it since the paper has been against Roark. Dominique says she will quit if they don’t print it. Alvah cables Wynand, who is in Bali, to ask what he should do, and Wynand writes back, “Fire the bitch.” Toohey intercepts the message before Scarret can talk to Dominique and is pleased to be able to break the news to her. On her way out, Dominique proclaims to Scarret that “nothing that [they] can do to [her]—or to [Roark]—will be worse than” what she will do to herself. 

A few days after the trial, Toohey is relaxing at home when Catherine says she wants to talk to him. She looks much older than her 26 years and very tired. In the last few years, Toohey had helped her get a job as a social worker, and she had a job at a settlement house. While he barely noticed her in recent years, she seems to cling to his advice even more strongly than before. She tells Toohey that she is “no good” and is “terribly unhappy.” Toohey tells her to “be [herself]” and Catherine says that is what she is most afraid of because she is “vicious.” 

Catherine says that she has tried to be unselfish because she knows that “one can find true happiness only in dedicating oneself to others,” as Toohey always says. Despite doing this, she is “unhappy in such a horrible, nasty, undignified way.” She knows she is turning into a hypocrite. The only emotion she has felt in years is tiredness, “as if there were nobody there to feel any more.” She admits that there is something even worse—she is beginning to hate people, and she is becoming “cruel and mean and petty” in a way she never was before. She “demand[s] gratitude” from the people she helps and finds herself liking the servile ones more. She suspects she is “vicious by nature and incapable of leading a good life,” but she also admits that she doesn’t know “a single selfless person in the world who’s happy—except [Toohey.]”

Toohey tells Catherine that she has been complaining about her personal unhappiness this whole time, and that she has been very selfish since she chose a “noble career” not for the good she could do, but for the personal happiness she wanted to find in it. He says she has been egotistical in seeking to be virtuous. Catherine wonders if it is wrong to want to have self-respect, and Toohey says one mustn’t want anything—she “must forget how important Miss Catherine Halsey is.” People are not important in themselves, but only in relation to others. She might feel some anger and pain as she works towards this, but he dismisses them as growing pains.

Catherine wonders whether her identity will be lost, but Toohey assures her she would have just “acquired a broader one, an identity that will be part of everybody else and of the whole universe.” When Catherine wants to know what exactly that means, he says he “can’t be too literal when [dealing] in abstractions.” He urges her to trust “[her] heart, not [her] brain,” to “not think,” but to “feel” and “believe.”

The following evening, Keating comes to visit Catherine. She hasn’t seen him in six months. For the past three years, they have met sometimes in public places but haven’t spoken of marriage in a long time. Catherine sees that Keating looks awful, and he admits he’s been drinking. He says “he couldn’t take any more,” and the one thing he wanted to do was to see her. He says he behaved in a rotten way towards someone “who can’t be hurt and so can’t forgive.” She says she can see he is struggling and that she forgives him, and Keating is grateful. He asks her to marry him once again and says that they should go ahead and do it by themselves, without announcing it to anyone, including his mother or her uncle. He says he’ll pick her up in the morning the day after the next. After he leaves, Catherine sobs “exultantly” and tells Toohey, “I’m not afraid of you, Uncle Ellsworth!”