The Fountainhead: Part 2: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

Dominique comes to visit Keating at his apartment when he is packing a suitcase for his wedding trip the following day. He thinks she looks like “a stranger who frighten[s] him with the crystal emptiness of her face.” She asks him to marry her and says that he should do it right away of he wants to. She wants “no questions, no conditions, no explanations,” and she refuses to give him time to think it over. She also says she would advise him to refuse her proposal. Keating says their wedding would be “a front-page event” and they should do it properly, with a ceremony, but Dominique says she doesn’t have the strength for that and that he can have his publicity afterwards. Keating says yes, and Dominique drives them to Connecticut where they get married at a judge’s house.

As they drive back, Keating asks where they will live now, and Dominique says she will move into his apartment. She says she will leave it to him to decide how to make the announcements. Keating realizes that now, as her husband, he can have sex with her, and he reaches out to touch her. She doesn’t “move, resist, or turn to look at him,” and he moves away. Dominique drops him home and gets ready to leave, and Keating is furious. She says she’ll send her things over and that “Everything will begin tomorrow.” Keating wants to know what he should “tell people tonight,” and she says anything he wishes to say would be fine.

Right after, Dominique goes to see Roark. She hasn’t seen him since the trial but tells him she doesn’t want to talk about it. They have sex, and the next morning, she tells him for the first time that she loves him. She goes on to say that she married Keating the previous day. She knows she has caused Roark great pain and is frightened for him, but he says he is all right. She says she has been afraid of loving anyone because she knew it would lead to her experiencing pain like she did in the courtroom and acting like she did on the witness stand. When she sees Roark, she wants a world in which he has “a fighting chance” and to “fight on [his] own terms.” But since that world doesn’t exist, she doesn’t want to be “torn between that which exists—and [him].”

Dominique says that Roark is “not aware of [the world],” but she is and can’t help it. She says he won’t win against them, but that she won’t be there to see it happen since she would have destroyed herself first. She chooses suffering as her “answer to [the world], and [her] gift to [Roark].” She will try not to see him again but will live for him in this way.

Roark asks Dominique if she’d annul the marriage and “forget the world and [his] struggle” and live as his wife and “property” if he told her to, and she agrees and says that she would “obey” him. Roark says he won’t ask this of her because he loves her. He loves her “selfishly,” for his “ego and [his] naked need.” If they married now, he would become her whole existence and he would not want her then, and she wouldn’t want him either. He says, “To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’” This is why he won’t stop her, even though he is deeply hurt. He says she “must learn not to be afraid of the world,” and he knows she will come back to him when she has learned this. He says the world can’t destroy either of them.