/DagnyTaggart visits
/UnitedLocomotiveWorks to determine why they consistently fail to deliver the Diesel engines she ordered. The
/PresidentofULW talks four 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. As she sits, 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.
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.
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