The Fountainhead: Part 2: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Every morning, Dominique resists the urge to return to the quarry. She has “lost the freedom she loved” but finds “a dark satisfaction in pain.” She visits her distant, elegant neighbors, and she is thrilled to think of how these people would react if they knew of her thoughts about the man in the quarry. One evening, an eminent young poet drives her back home and tries to kiss her. She jumps out of the car and walks away. When such things happened in the past, “she had been amused” but “felt no revulsion.”

Dominique realizes that the man in the quarry desires her, and the “silent splendor” of her house makes this seem very strange. She knows she can make him suffer. She wants to challenge the safety of her house, so she tries to break a marble slab in front of the fireplace in her bedroom, and then asks Roark to come fix it later that day. She tells him to take the “servants’ entrance.” Roark agrees without astonishment, which first disappoints her, but she then realizes how deep their understanding is.

That evening, Dominique asks the caretaker and his wife to remain in the house. When Roark appears, she notices that the house looks incongruous with his “relaxed kind of energy.” He begins his work, commenting that the fireplace is “atrocious.” Dominique says it was designed by her father and there is no point in his “discussing the work of an architect.” Roark says, “Yes, Miss Francon.” When he finishes removing the stone, she pays him and expects him to throw the money in her face. Roark pockets it, which angers her.

When the new piece of marble arrives, Dominique sends Roark a note to come set it that night. Roark sends another man from the quarry to fix it, and Dominique is very angry and also terrified because she knows she will go to the quarry now. Dominique rides out to the quarry one evening, but she doesn’t see Roark there. She rides into the woods and suddenly sees him walking ahead of her. She asks him why he didn’t come to fix the marble and Roark says “I didn’t think it would make any difference to you who came. Or did it, Miss Francon?” Dominique feels like these words are a blow to her face, and she slashes at Roark with a branch before riding off.

Three nights later, while Dominique is getting ready for bed, she hears footsteps outside and finds Roark entering her room through the French windows. He kisses her, though she struggles against him silently and feels “hatred, the helpless terror in her blood.” He throws her on the bed and rapes her, and then leaves without a word. Dominique feels he had sex with her as “an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement.” If he had been tender, it would have left her cold, but she’d wanted “the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her.” She notices, as if from a distance, that she is sobbing and shaking.

The next morning, Roark thinks that his previous night with Dominique had been as pleasurable to him as building. Moments like these keep him going through the rest of life. He feels that they are now “united in an understanding beyond the violence, beyond the deliberate obscenity of his action.” He thinks of Dominique as he works in the quarry, and finds it “strange to be conscious of another person’s existence.” He feels it is “important to think of her, […] with her body still his, now his forever, of what she thought.”

That night, Roark reads in the paper that Roger Enright still hasn’t found an architect for his project. He feels a “wrench of helplessness before the vision of what he could do.” A week later, he gets a letter from Enright, who writes that he has been trying to track him down, if he is indeed the person who designed the Fargo Store. In half an hour, Roark is on a train to New York. When the train moves, he remembers Dominique and that he is leaving her behind. The thought seems unimportant to him—he is astonished he even thinks of her at a time like this.

Meanwhile, Dominique thinks she could accept and forget all the things that happened, except that she found pleasure in them and that the man from the quarry knew it. This is why she hates him. Alvah Scarret writes her a letter, saying that everyone is impatiently waiting for her to come back, and that it “will be like the homecoming of an Empress.” She wonders what the people back home who treat her with such reverence would think if they knew that she has “been raped by some red-headed hoodlum from a stone quarry.” The sense of humiliation gives her pleasure.

A week passes, and Dominique goes to find Roark in the quarry. The foreman tells her he quit suddenly and left for New York. She doesn’t ask for his name, believing it is “her last chance of freedom,” and walks away in relief. If she knew his name, she’d be on her way to New York to look for him, but she doesn’t, and she is now safe.