The Fountainhead: Part 2: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Keating tries to read Lois Cook’s book, which is supposed to be a record of her travels around the world, but which reads like a bunch of random words strung together without meaning. Keating thinks it must be profound because he doesn’t understand it, and he likes the book. Toohey had told him that “only the finest spirit” can appreciate the book, and Keating feels superior to those who admit they can’t understand it.

In the papers, Keating sees Roark’s drawing for the Enright House, which looks like “a rising mass of rock crystal” with its straight lines and clean angles. Keating looks at Cook’s book, and feels like it is his defense against Roark. 

Later, Keating goes to have tea with Toohey and Catherine at the distinguished residential hotel they now live in. Toohey has an air of “cautious gentleness” which makes Keating and Catherine feel like “insignificant soap bubbles.” Catherine looks tired and colorless, and Keating wonders at her lack of joy and hunched demeanor. When she pours the tea, Toohey asks her why she grips the teapot “as if it were a meat axe,” and he continues that “it’s charming” and that’s why they love her—they wouldn’t love her if she “were as graceful as a duchess.” Catherine spills the tea right after.

Keating anxiously asks Toohey if he approves of their marriage, and Toohey says he does, and then adds that Keating asks the question “as if the whole thing were important enough to disapprove of.” He adds that love is sweet but trite.

Toohey asks Keating when they plan to be married and Keating says they never set a date with his work and now Catherine’s. Catherine works as a day nursery attendant at the Clifford Settlement House, and Keating says she will have to quit after they are married because he doesn’t approve of the work. Toohey agrees that she must quit if she doesn’t like it, but Catherine says she does. She has never enjoyed something so much in her life as she enjoys “Helping people who’re helpless and unhappy.” Her voice shines as though she were “speaking of great beauty.”

Keating changes the subject and asks Toohey what he thinks of Roark. Toohey claims never to have heard of him but Keating suspects this isn’t true. He tells Toohey about the plans for the Enright House in the paper, and Toohey says he glanced through the paper and would have remembered it if it was worth remembering. Keating feels a deep sense of relief, and he wants “to laugh, freely, stupidly, without dignity.” Keating tells Toohey that he and Roark are old friends from Stanton. Toohey immediately asks him many personal questions about Roark, like whether he laughs often and likes to be admired. Keating tells him Roark is “a maniac on the subject of architecture” and that “He’d walk over corpses” if he couldn’t be an architect.

Keating and Catherine go for a walk together after tea, and when they are alone, Keating once again feels for her “the strange emotion that he could not keep in the presence of others.” But Toohey’s tongue-in-cheek comments about love stick in his mind, and he wonders if he and Catherine look ridiculous to passersby.

Later, when Keating meets his client Lois Cook, he feels uncomfortable in her presence. She looks offensively unkempt and says startling things like, “Money is commonplace. Cabbage is commonplace too.” Keating compliments her book and she tells him to “can the crap.” He angrily insists on its brilliance but she looks bored and says that it is commonplace “to be understood by everybody.”

Cook tells Keating that Toohey is organizing a youth group for writers and that she will chair it. Keating happily tells her that he will chair the group of architects that Toohey is organizing, and she winks and says, “One of us?” Keating doesn’t understand her meaning, which seems to disappoint her and makes her laugh at him, calling him a “sweet boy.” When she speaks of Toohey, her voice is “flagrantly devoid of respect,” even though she agrees with Keating that he is “a wonderful man.”

Cook makes bizarre demands about the house she wants Keating to design for her, saying she wants it to be “the ugliest house in New York” because “the beautiful is so commonplace.” Keating designs it as she wishes, and it ends up looking like “a structure from an amusement park.” Toohey calls it “a cosmic joke,” and it is well-received by the intelligentsia. However, Keating feels ashamed of it.