"Wait. Let me finish. You could ask, why not kill myself then. Because I love you. Because you exist. That alone is so much that it won't allow me to die. And since I must be alive in order to know that you are, I will live in the world as it is, in the manner of life it demands. Not halfway, but completely. Not pleading and running from it, but walking out to meet it, beating it to the pain & ugliness, being first to choose the worst it can do to me. And only within my own mind, only where nothing can touch it, kept sacred by the protecting wall of my own degradation, there will be the thought of you, and i shall say 'Howard Roark' to myself once in a while, and I shall feel I have deserved to sat it."
She stood before him, her face raised; her lips were not drawn, but closed softly, yet the shape of her mouth was too definite on her face, a shape of pain and tenderness, and resignation.
"Dominique, if I told you now...to forget the world and my struggle...to feel no answer, no concern, no hope- just to exist for me, for my own need of you-as my wife-as my property...?"
He saw in her face what she had seen in his when she told him of her marriage; but he was not frightened and he watched her calmly. After a while, she answered and the words did not come from her lips, but as if her lips were forced to gather the sounds from the outside.
"I'd obey you."
"Now you see why I won't do it. I won't try to stop you. I love you, Dominique."
She closed her eyes, and he said:
"You'd rather not hear it now? But I want you to hear it. We never need to say anything to each other when we're together. This is- for the time when we won't be together. I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I've given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way you can wish to be loved. This is the only way I can want you to love me. If you married me now, I would become your whole existence. But i would not want you then. You would not want yourself- and so you would not love me long. To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.' The kind of surrender I could have from you now would give me nothing but an empty hulk. If I demanded it, I'd destroy you. That's why I won't stop you. I'll let you go. I don't know how I'll live through tonight, but I will. I want you whole, as I am, as you'll remain in the battle you've chosen. A battle is never self-less."
She heard, in the measured tension of his words, that it was harder for him to speak them than for her to listen. So she listened.
"You must learn not to be afraid of the world. Not to be held by it as you are now. Never to be hurt by it as you were in that courtroom. I must let you learn it. I can't help you. You must find your own way. When you have, you'll come back to me. They won't destroy me, Dominique. And they won't destroy you. You'll win, because you've chosen the hardest way of fighting for your freedom from the world. I'll wait for you. I love you. I'm saying this now for all the years we'll have to wait. I love you, Dominique."
Then he kissed her and let her go.
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