Atlas Shrugged Part I, Chapter 9: The Sacred and the Profane (Part 1) - Dagny and Hank's New Dynamic

Chapter 9 opens with the morning after. And I mean that literally. Dagny wakes up in an unfamiliar room, strips of sunlight on her skin from the Venetian blinds, a bruise on her arm. Hank Rearden is beside her. The John Galt Line has been built, the bridge held, the world watched, and these two people ended up in bed together somewhere along the return trip from Wyatt Junction.

So far, so good. But then Hank opens his mouth.

The Speech That Shouldn’t Work

Rearden gets dressed with military precision, not looking at Dagny. And then he delivers what might be the strangest post-intimacy speech in all of literature. He tells her he feels contempt for her and even more for himself. He says he wanted her “as one wants a whore.” He says he would give up his mills, his Metal, everything, just for this desire he despises.

He’s not angry at her. He’s angry at himself for wanting her. He sees desire as weakness. As degradation. As proof that he’s not the rational, self-contained man he thought he was.

Here’s the thing. If you grew up anywhere near a culture shaped by religious guilt or Soviet-era puritanism, this speech makes a strange kind of sense. I knew men like this. Men who built factories, ran departments, held everything together, and then privately loathed themselves for having any human need at all. The idea that wanting someone is a form of surrender, that pleasure is somehow beneath a serious person. That’s not just a Rand invention. That’s a real worldview, and it cripples people.

So what does Dagny do? She laughs. Not in anger. Not in mockery. She laughs because she sees no problem where he sees catastrophe. Then she stands up, kicks her clothes aside, and tells him straight: “I want you, Hank. I’m much more of an animal than you think.”

Her counter-speech is just as long and just as intense, but it comes from the opposite direction. Where he sees shame, she sees pride. Where he calls it depravity, she calls it her greatest achievement. She tells him that if anyone ever asks her to name her proudest attainment, she’ll say: “I have slept with Hank Rearden. I had earned it.”

I’ll be honest. This whole scene is over the top. Rand writes love scenes like a philosopher drafting a thesis defense. But the core of it is real. Two people who see the same experience through completely different moral lenses. One believes desire diminishes him. The other believes it elevates her. And they’re both talking about the same night.

Jim Taggart Meets Cherryl Brooks

The scene shifts hard. Suddenly we’re in the rain with James Taggart, shuffling through dark streets with a cold, no handkerchief, and nowhere to go. The John Galt Line is all over the newspapers. The Board of Directors just praised him. His stock is soaring. And he’s miserable.

He wanders into a dime store to buy paper tissues. And this is where he meets Cherryl Brooks.

She’s nineteen. From Buffalo. Came to New York six months ago with nothing. Works the counter. She recognizes him from the newspaper and her whole face lights up. She thinks he’s the man behind the John Galt Line, the secret genius who made it all happen, because that’s what his PR department put in the papers.

And Jim lets her believe it. He doesn’t correct her. He soaks it up like a sponge.

This scene is painful to read, and I think it’s one of Rand’s sharpest. Cherryl is genuine. She has that bright-eyed, unbroken optimism of someone who left a bad family, bought a train ticket, and decided to make something of herself. She asks Jim how it feels to be a great man. She tells him nobody’s really good enough for him. She means every word.

Jim takes her home for drinks. And then something revealing happens. He starts ranting about Rearden. About how Rearden didn’t invent iron ore. About how nobody really invents anything. Cherryl pushes back gently: “But the iron ore was there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal?” Jim has no answer, so he pivots to philosophy. Pride is a sin. Humility is the only virtue. Material achievement is nothing. Unhappiness is the hallmark of greatness.

Cherryl can’t follow most of this. But she tries. She thinks Jim is being modest. She thinks his dissatisfaction means he’s ambitious, always reaching higher. She’s wrong, but she doesn’t know it yet.

The saddest part? Jim glances in a mirror and sees himself clearly: the sagging posture, the thinning hair. And he realizes that Cherryl doesn’t see any of it. She sees a hero. He finds this funny. He feels a “superiority of having put something over on her.”

He walks her home to her rooming house. She’s grateful that he didn’t try anything. She thinks this makes him noble. He lets her think that too. And standing on the sidewalk afterward, he feels a foggy satisfaction, “as if he had committed an act of virtue and as if he had taken his revenge upon every person who had stood cheering along the three-hundred-mile track of the John Galt Line.”

That last line is brutal. Jim can’t create anything. So he takes the one genuinely good thing in his evening and turns it into a weapon against people who can.

Dagny and Hank in New York

Back to the main storyline. Rearden drops Dagny off at Philadelphia without a word when their train arrives. That evening, he shows up at her apartment unannounced.

This scene is quieter but just as loaded. He sits in her apartment, the place he’d been imagining for two years but never entered, and he talks about their day. Orders for Rearden Metal are flooding in. Thousands of tons per hour. Everyone wants to talk to him. Everyone wants to see Dagny. A young reporter said she was a great woman and he’d be afraid to speak to her.

But Rearden isn’t making small talk. He’s building toward something. He describes the admiration, the respect, the distance people keep from Dagny. How they looked at her as if she stood on a mountain peak. And then he grabs her and pulls her down.

The pattern is becoming clear. Rearden needs to establish Dagny’s greatness before he can “bring her low.” He needs to feel like he’s pulling something sacred into the profane. It’s twisted, and Rand knows it. The chapter title isn’t accidental.

Later that night, he asks her about other men. She tells him there was one, when she was seventeen. She won’t say who. He pushes. She pushes back. And the tension between them keeps spiraling upward.

My Take

This first half of Chapter 9 is doing something smart. It’s taking the triumph of the John Galt Line and immediately asking: now what? The bridge held. The Metal works. The money is rolling in. But none of that solves the personal conflicts these characters carry.

Rearden is a man at war with his own desires. Jim is a man who feeds on unearned admiration. Cherryl is an innocent walking into a trap she can’t see. And Dagny is the only one who seems at peace with who she is and what she wants.

The contrast between the two “couples” is deliberate and sharp. Dagny and Hank have real passion tangled up with real guilt. Jim and Cherryl have nothing real at all, just a con artist and a believer.

More of this chapter coming in Part 2, where the political pressures really start closing in.

Previous: Part I, Chapter 8: The John Galt Line

Next: Part I, Chapter 9: The Sacred and the Profane (Part 2)

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (35th Anniversary Edition, ISBN: 978-1-101-13719-2). New posts daily.