The Fountainhead: Part 2: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Some days later, Dominique is working on her column at her house when Ellsworth Toohey drops in unexpectedly. He says he’s heard that Dominique has been throwing parties and socializing, and that people have been saying she is much better at it than Kiki Holcombe. He finds it fascinating that people are so eager to be friends with someone who has snubbed them all their lives, but apparently they are—probably because they understand that Dominique is degrading herself because she needs them, since “loneliness is a pinnacle.” Toohey knows that Dominique is suffering by doing it.

Toohey asks Dominique how many commissions she has landed for Keating in the past three months. She says four, and tells him that he has employed the “Toohey technique” with her, which is filling “a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.” He tells her that “They’ll love anything [he] write[s],” meaning his readers. 

Toohey asks Dominique how many more commissions she might be able to land for Keating if she is willing to sell her “matchless body” for it, and then adds that he didn’t mean anything by the comment, but just included it for a “touch of vulgarity,” since he is such an “earnest, single-toned Puritan” all the time and wanted to “relieve the monotony.” Dominique says she is not sure what he is, and Toohey says almost nobody does, although when people are reduced down to the fundamentals, there are just two kinds. Most people wouldn’t “like the results” even if they did know. Dominique is sure he thinks she is a “bitch,” but he says she is a “saint,” which is “much worse.” 

Toohey rattles off a list of all the commissions that Dominique has taken away from Roark and sent Keating’s way. She is shocked that he knows what she is up to. He says they are allies, since they have “a common enemy,” even though their “motives might be quite the opposite.” He asks her to stop mentioning Roark so much in her columns, since she is keeping his name alive in print. Also, she must start inviting Toohey to her parties and stop the Coltons from hiring Roark to build a factory. Dominique tells him she didn’t know he cared about Roark since he never writes about him—Toohey says this is because he does not want to give him any publicity.

After a while, Dominique begins to find it easy to endure boredom and attend parties where she praises Keating and criticizes Roark. She often goes to see Roark at night to sleep with him, where she feels she can be her true self. She likes to tell him how she’s taken commissions away from him and given them to Keating, which Roark always finds amusing, despite having wanted the work. Sometimes, he is working when she arrives, and he asks her to wait for him to finish. She likes watching “the ascetic purity of his person” at work.

Roark comes to Dominique’s apartment at night sometimes, and if she has guests over, he asks her to get rid of them and she obeys—they have a silent agreement to never be seen together. Once, she tells him that she has done all the things she does “because it’s the kind of a world that made [him] work in a quarry last summer,” and he says he knows that.

Everywhere, people are talking about Dominique’s hatred for Roark, and it pleases her to hear this. Austen Heller, who used to be Dominique’s friend, is angry with her and says he used to think she had integrity. Roger Enright takes her to see his house, which is under construction, in an attempt to change her mind about Roark. Dominique sees the sky through the steel beams that seem to push it back further in the sky. She stares at the “insolent angles, at the incredible complexity of this shape coming to life as a simple, logical whole,” and she is overawed.

A few days later, Dominique writes in her column that she wishes a bomb would blast the Enright house out of existence. She writes that it would be “a worthy ending” rather than to see it “growing old and soot-stained,” and “degraded” by its inhabitants. Roark tells her that he is flattered by her “extravagant praise,” but that someone else might recognize it as praise, too, which she wouldn’t like. She tells him most people wouldn’t but that Toohey might, and Roark wonders why anyone would want to think of Toohey.

Dominique likes that no one knows that she and Roark are lovers—this makes the moments they share “greater” since they are untouched by the awareness of others. When she sees Roark talking to someone else who looks at him with approval, she feels it is an impertinence, while she is pleased when he is met with hostility. She tells Roark that the other day she saw a man smiling at him, when right before he had enjoyed a pair of “movie comedians.” Dominique was furious about this, and wanted to tell the man not to look at Roark and approve of him with the same eyes. She yearns to take Roark away “from their world, from all of them.”

Meanwhile, Keating is bewildered that Dominique has taken such an interest in furthering his career. He is mostly flattered by it, since everyone tells him he must be, but sometimes he feels uneasy. He avoids Guy Francon because Francon thinks his daughter is in love with Keating, while Keating knows she isn’t. She refuses to see him alone, though she sees him often at the parties she throws and assumes an air of intimacy with him that all the guests notice and are impressed by.

Keating happens to catch Dominique dining alone at a restaurant, and he asks her why she’s been refusing to see him alone—to which she says there is no reason for her to want to. Keating says he is so grateful for her help and asks her if she really thinks he is a great architect. Dominique avoids the question, saying that he sells “like hot cakes,” which is proof enough.

Keating takes comfort in attending Toohey’s Council of American Builders. Gordon L. Prescott is making a metaphysical speech about how architects “deal in nothing” and “create emptiness,” and therefore face “reality as nonreality.” Keating watches in “thick contentment,” glancing at the audience, pleased that they like it as much as he does. Toohey attends the meetings, too, but he only listens and watches. One night, he and Keating go for coffee together, and Toohey talks about the importance of kindness and universal equality. Keating doesn’t pay much attention to his words, but his “matchless voice” gives him a sense of security.