The Fountainhead: Part 4: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

One evening, Keating bumps into Catherine Halsey in the street. She smiles at him pleasantly, “not as an effort over bitterness.” She lives in Washington now, and has come to New York just to visit. She says she is happy that Keating is working on the Cortlandt Homes, not just “for private profit and a fat fee, but with a social purpose.” Keating feels she “owe[s] him an evidence of strain in this meeting,” but there is none. She suggests they go have a cup of tea somewhere to catch up, and says he looks frozen. This is the first comment she makes on his appearance, and Keating thinks that even Roark “had been shocked, had acknowledged the change,” while she is indifferent.

At the restaurant, Keating feels that Catherine “seem[s] to have no consciousness of her own person” and does not react to his scrutiny. He tells her he has been very unhappy, and that he has been married and divorced. Catherine says she was glad when he was divorced because if his wife could marry Wynand, he was lucky to be rid of her. She doesn’t sound emotional about it, and Keating knows that these events do not affect her beyond this. He tells her to “drop the act” and tell him what she really felt all those years ago when he didn’t show up at her apartment and she heard he was married. She says it is conceited and childish of him to expect recriminations, but admits she suffered then, though it seemed foolish afterwards. She says, “everybody goes through them, like measles.”

Catherine says that it was all for the best since she can’t imagine being married to Keating, or to anyone else, since she is “temperamentally unsuited to domesticity.” Keating tells her that the worst thing he ever did in his life was to leave her, and not only because he caused her so much pain but because to marry her was “the only thing [he] ever really wanted.” He says, “the hardest thing in the world” is to do what one really wants because “it takes the greatest kind of courage.”

Catherine says the things Keating is saying are “ugly and selfish.” When Keating talks about the past, he realizes that, for Catherine, the past has never existed. She treats him with “amused tolerance” and he thinks that “one can’t put on an act like that—unless it’s an act inside, for oneself, and then there is no limit, no way out, no reality….”