The Fountainhead P. 503-534

Howard is kept busy with his work in the beginning of this section. He is building a resort in a place called Monadnock Valley, and spends eighteen months building it. There are no ad’s or advertisements for the resort as its opening approaches, as the people who hired him set it up to fail, selling 200% of shares of the resort. Their plain fails, as the resort becomes greatly successful and its popularity makes it end up being booked a year in advance. While Howard did not care for what reason he got the commission, it does show the fight between him and a society that, this time, literally and directly set out to fail. With this commission though, his popularity spreads, because now people had heard his name, and “the simple fact that Roark had built a place which made money for owners who didn’t want to make money” (Rand, 513) caused him to get many small commissions that kept him busy. This struggle with society is not as important as his complete disregard for it; so long as he is allowed to do what he wants, he does not care.
Gail Wynand, the now wife of Dominique, meets with Roark to discuss him building a home for him, “because I’m very desperately in love with my wife” (Rand, 519). This brings out several conflicts all at the same time. Wynand afterward researches Roark, and discovers what his paper had done to his Stoddard Temple, and is torn between what he desires, and what is expected of the owner of the Banner paper. Howard is conflicted between his love for Dominique and his love for building, but being a man who truly loves to build at any cost, is able to push that out of his mind and accept the commission as he would have for anyone else agreeing to his terms. These conflicts in a way bring Wynand and Roark into conflict, as Wynand tried to bribe Roark, by telling him that, in exchange for this commission, he must become the Banner’s architect, and that would require making things the ways others would require. Roark tells him he’d accept, if he’d take his personal house made of the same butchered forms of art, and Gail admits defeat, knowing that Roark’s integrity cannot be budged.
The section ends setting up for more conflicts between desires and roles of society, as Gail invites Roark to dinner with him and Dominique, “I know she hasn’t been kind to you in the past – I read what she wrote about you. But it’s so long ago. I hope it doesn’t matter now” (Rand, 534). The conflict will be if Dominique feels the same way and if Roark was telling the truth when he replied it didn’t. Dominique is also only aware that Gail wishes to build a house, and does not know that he has picked an architect yet, or that it is Howard.