The Fountainhead: Part 3: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Wynand’s yacht is named I Do, and Dominique asks him what it means. He says the words he heard most often as a child were, “You don’t run things around here,” to which his yacht’s name is a response. She has heard that he never reveals the story behind the yacht’s name and is surprised he told her immediately. The yacht is very luxurious, and Dominique is surprised when he leaves her alone in her room, without demanding sex.

Wynand and Dominique talk about how it is impossible to love all men equally, and about how love is never pity but is “reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance.” They talk and laugh together, and Dominique feels no sense of strain between them, as if they have forgotten the purpose of the trip. After dinner, she expects him to initiate sex, but he doesn’t.

They go up on deck, and Dominique says she is sure Wynand has never experienced the “vicious bromide” of feeling small when looking at the ocean. Wynand agrees, saying he only feels “the greatness of man,” “of man’s magnificent capacity” to build a ship and “conquer all that senseless space.” Dominique says she never experiences a sense of awe from nature, but feels it when she sees skyscrapers. Wynand agrees, saying he feels religious ecstasy at “the will of man made visible,” and he mocks pilgrimages people take to a “dank pesthole in the jungle” to see “a leering stone monster with a pot belly” when they can see sublime beauty right in New York. Dominique says she can barely tell her thoughts apart from his words.

When Dominique asks when they are going to go to their rooms (to have sex), Wynand says they won’t be doing that. Instead, he asks Dominique to marry him. Dominique cannot hide her shock. Wynand says he knows he is “the symbol of [her] contempt” and her “tool of self-destruction.” He knows she doesn’t love him, and yet he wants to marry her. He says that marrying him can be, for her, an act of “revenge against the world.” She will be free to leave the marriage whenever she wishes to. Wynand says he loves her. Dominique recognizes that he speaks “her language,” that the “offer and the form he gave it were of her own world.” She almost wants to ask to never see him again.

But then, Dominique remembers the Stoddard Temple and how the Banner had played such a big role in ruining Roark. She tells Wynand she will marry him and be “Mrs. Wynand-Papers.” She wants to have sex with him right then so their marriage won’t be important, but he refuses—he wants it to be important. When he kisses her, she tries to not respond but ends up enjoying it.