The Fountainhead, P. 201-232

In this section Howard Roark has spend two months working in the query without any incident. Several miles away Dominique is taking her vacation alone in her father’s mansion, which is how they first meet in the book. They do not speak, but simply stare at each other for a few days when Dominique comes down to the query until they actually talk. Their feelings seem contrast with their words, showing a feeling of, “[Dominique] thought she had found an aim in life – a sudden, sweeping hatred for that man” (Rand, 205), with ‘that man’, being Howard. But they do have an attraction to one another, and while they do not become verbally intimate in this section of the book, they do become intimate in other ways. Shortly after this, Roark is given a letter of a rich man, Roger Enright, who wishes him to build a house for him, allowing him to leave his query job, and resume his role as an architect. They use this to show the relationship between them in Roark’s thoughts, “When the train started moving, [Roark] remembered Dominique and that he was leaving her behind…He was astonished only to know that he still thought of her” (Rand, 219). The relationship seems to be one of affection under a façade of contempt, but it also seems awkward and somehow not fitting the way it is expressed.
Keating had a very small portion in these pages of the book, with him working on constructing the masterpiece he had Roark help him design, the Cosmo-Slotnick Building, and contracts a sculptor named Steven Mallory, who is talented to a point that his statues of men, “looked as if he could break through the steel plate of a battleship and through any barrier whatever. It stood like a challenge…made the people around it seem smaller and sadder than usual” (Rand, 222). His work is seen like Roark’s as being to far beyond the accepted norm of the time and is fired from the commission. But after setting an appointment to finally meet with Ellsworth Toohey, through his success in the Cosmo-Slotnick Building, his x-sculptor, Steven Mallory, attempts to shoot Ellsworth for no apparent reason whatsoever. It does not phase Toohey on his façade to the people around him other than the question of why? When Keating meets with Ellsworth, he realizes that Toohey knows he did not construct the building on his own, and still seems to accept him as a close and dear friend. The only contempt that he shows for Toohey was when he mentions his niece, the only thing that Keating is truly sincere about and genuine of in affection in the whole book. This contempt shows the conflict within Keating, between what he wants, and what he thinks he should want. While he knows he wants to be with Catherine, he does all these other things to be successful, because that’s what people like Francon, Ellsworth, and his mother have all told him is what he should want.