"Sure," said Keating. "Sure, you will. How's everything here in the office?"
"Oh, fine. Same as usual. Lucius had a cold and drank up all of my best Bas Armagnac. It's bad for his heart, and a hundred dollars a case! ... Besides, Lucius got himself caught in a nasty little mess. It's that phobia of his, his damn porcelain. Seems he went and bought a teapot from a fence. He knew it was stolen goods, too. Took me quite a bit of bother to save us from a scandal ... Oh, by the way, I fired that friend of yours, what's his name? — Roark."
"Oh," said Keating, and let a moment pass, then asked:
"Why?"
"The insolent bastard! Where did you ever pick him up?"
"What happened?"
"I thought I'd be nice to him, give him a real break. I asked him to make a sketch for the Farrell Building — you know, the one Brent finally managed to design and we got Farrell to accept, you know, the simplified Doric — and your friend just up and refused to do it. It seems he has ideals or something. So I showed him the gate ... What's the matter? What are you smiling at?"
"Nothing. I can just see it."
"Now don't you ask me to take him back!"
"No, of course not."
For several days, Keating thought that he should call on Roark. He did not know what he would say, but felt dimly that he should say something. He kept postponing it. He was gaining assurance in his work. He felt that he did not need Roark, after all. The days went by, and he did not call on Roark, and he felt relief in being free to forget him.
Beyond the windows of his room Roark saw the roofs, the water tanks, the chimneys, the cars speeding far below. There was a threat in the silence of his room, in the empty days, in his hands hanging idly by his sides. And he felt another threat rising from the city below, as if each window, each strip of pavement, had set itself closed grimly, in wordless resistance. It did not disturb him. He had known and accepted it long ago.
He made a list of the architects whose work he resented least, in the order of their lesser evil, and he set out upon the search for a job, coldly, systematically, without anger or hope. He never knew whether these days hurt him; he knew only that it was a thing which had to be done.
The architects he saw differed from one another. Some looked at him across the desk, kindly and vaguely, and their manner seemed to say that it was touching, his ambition to be an architect, touching and laudable and strange and attractively sad as all the delusions of youth. Some smiled at him with thin, drawn lips and seemed to enjoy his presence in the room, because it made them conscious of their own accomplishment. Some spoke coldly, as if his ambition were a personal insult. Some were brusque, and the sharpness of their voices seemed to say that they needed good draftsmen, they always needed good draftsmen, but this qualification could not possibly apply to him, and would he please refrain from being rude enough to force them to express it more plainly.
It was not malice. It was not a judgment passed upon his merit. They did not think he was worthless. They simply did not care to find out whether he was good. Sometimes, he was asked to show his sketches; he extended them across a desk, feeling a contraction of shame in the muscles of his hand; it was like having the clothes torn off his body, and the shame was not, that his body was exposed, but that it was exposed to indifferent eyes. Once in a while he made a trip to New Jersey, to see Cameron. They sat together on the porch of a house on a hill, Cameron in a wheel chair, his hands on an old blanket spread over his knees. "How is it, Howard? Pretty hard?"
"No."
"Want me to give you a letter to one of the bastards?"
"No."
Then Cameron would not speak of it any more, he did not want to speak of it, he did not want the thought of Roark rejected by their city to become real. When Roark came to him, Cameron spoke of architecture with the simple confidence of a private possession. They sat together, looking at he city in the distance, on the edge of the sky, beyond the river. The sky was growing dark and luminous as blue-green glass; the buildings looked like clouds condensed on the glass, gray-blue clouds frozen for an instant in straight angles and vertical shafts, with the sunset caught in the spires ...
As the summer months passed, as his list was exhausted and he returned again to the places that had refused him once, Roark found that a few things were known about him and he heard the same words — spoken bluntly or timidly or angrily or apologetically — "You were kicked out of Stanton. You were kicked out of Francon's office." All the different voices saying it had one note in common: a note of relief in the certainty that the decision had been made for them.
He sat on the window sill, in the evening, smoking, his hand spread on the pane, the city under his fingers, the glass cold against his skin.
In September, he read an article entitled "Make Way For Tomorrow" by Gordon L. Prescott, A.G.A. in the Architectural Tribune. The article stated that the tragedy of the profession was the hardships placed in the way of its talented beginners; that great gifts had been lost in the struggle, unnoticed; that architecture was perishing from a lack of new blood and new thought, a lack of originality, vision and courage; that the author of the article made it his aim to search for promising beginners, to encourage them, develop them and give them the chance they deserved. Roark had never heard of Gordon L. Prescott, but there was a tone of honest conviction in the article. He allowed himself to start for Prescott's office with the first hint of hope.
The reception room of Gordon L. Prescott's office was done in gray, black and scarlet; it was correct, restrained and daring all at once. A young and very pretty secretary informed Roark that one could not see Mr. Prescott without an appointment, but that she would be very glad to make an appointment for next Wednesday at two-fifteen. On Wednesday at two-fifteen, the secretary smiled at Roark and asked him please to be seated for just a moment. At four forty-five he was admitted into Gordon L. Prescott's office. Gordon L. Prescott wore a brown checkered tweed jacket and a white turtle-neck sweater of angora wool. He was tall, athletic and thirty-five, but his face combined a crisp air of sophisticated wisdom with the soft skin, the button nose, the small, puffed mouth of a college hero. His face was sun-scorched, his blond hair clipped short, in a military Prussian haircut. He was frankly masculine, frankly unconcerned about elegance and frankly conscious of the effect.