/DagnyTaggart visits
/UnitedLocomotiveWorks to determine why they consistently fail to deliver the Diesel engines she ordered. The
/PresidentofULW talks for hours without answering directly or saying anything of substance. After returning to the office,
/EddieWillers informs Dagny that
/McNamara has quit without explanation. As Dagny walks home that night she sees the depravity that passes for popular culture: books and movies that trivialize what is glorious, demonize what is moral, and exalt what is base; people who act as if pleasure were a sin that one gets away with. Depressed, she returns home and listens the soul tonic of
/RichardHalley. While she listens, she recalls Halley's struggles as a young composer, his sudden success, and his mysterious disappearance. She sees in the newspaper that
/FranciscoDAnconia has returned to
/NewYork amidst a scandal in which a married woman tried to kill her husband so she could be with Francisco, who she identifies as her lover. Francisco says he came to New York to witness the farce - but it is not the farce people are led to beleive that he wants to witness.
The offices of Taggart Transcontinental, New York in the evening, Dagny's apartment.
Dagny sees a precision machine tool anandoned and decaying in the /UnitedLocomotiveWorks factory; abandoned not because it was valueless, but because the owners could not extract value from it. This foreshadows another discovery in an even less competent factory - a motor that is pricelss, but which is left abandoned by people who could not see its value.
The folowing characters appear in /SectioN141:
/ChiefEngineer
/DagnyTaggart
/EddieWillers
/FranciscoDAnconia
/GilbertVail
/McNamara - Mentioned.
/MrsGilbertVail
/PresidentofULW
/RichardHalley
![[Home]](wikipedia.png)