The Fountainhead

Peter Keating is graduating from the Architectural School at the top of his class. He is awarded a scholarship to the School of Fine Arts in Paris and offered a job by the guest speaker, Guy Francon, a famous architect from New York. Keating is aware of the admiring attention that he receives throughout the graduation ceremony, both for his good looks and his achievements, and he feels pleasure at having beaten his rivals to the top position. In his youth, Keating wanted to be an artist, but he instead became an architect to please his overbearing mother. Arriving home, he offers Roark his condolences for the expulsion, but Roark is unfazed. Keating previously sought out Roark’s help with various assignments, and now, he asks Roark’s advice on whether to take the job offer or the scholarship. Roark admonishes him for asking another person’s opinion instead of deciding for himself. Mrs. Keating interrupts them and passive-aggressively pressures her son to take the job offer, and Roark agrees since he himself plans to seek a job in New York with Henry Cameron. Keating is aghast because although Cameron was once a successful Modernist architect, his work has since gone out of fashion, and Cameron himself has slipped into obscurity. Nonetheless, Keating agrees to take the job with Francon and writes a telegram to inform Catherine, the girl he loves, before heading out to a party.

Keating starts work in Francon’s office and immediately establishes himself with the other draftsmen. The head designer, Stengel, does all the actual designing for the firm. He then sends Keating upstairs to Francon’s office so that the boss can sign off on Stengel’s designs. Keating encourages Francon to make minor changes simply for the sake of exerting his authority over Stengel, and Francon agrees, leading to an unspoken understanding between the two of them.

Cameron was a successful Modernist architect until Modernism fell out of fashion and the American public became preoccupied with historical styles of architecture. He now gets little work, particularly since the death of his partner, who handled the client-facing side of the business. In his isolation, Cameron has become addicted to alcohol. Roark nonetheless admires his work and meets with him in Cameron’s modest New York office to show him his sketches and ask for a job. Cameron insults Roark by harshly critiquing his sketches and then hires him.

Keating has formed a good relationship with Francon, and they discuss an article written by Ellsworth Toohey. The article praises Francon’s work, and Francon predicts that Toohey will soon be an important figure in the field of architecture. Keating has also established himself in the office and has befriended the favored draftsman, Tim Davis, offering to stay late to complete Davis’s work in his stead. Keating visits Catherine on a sudden whim. He loves her, but he regularly forgets about her for months at a time. He also feels ashamed at the thought of being with her publicly because she isn’t beautiful, refined, or ambitious like the other girls he dates. She is always glad to see him, however, and asks nothing of him. An orphan, she lives with her uncle, whom she reveals to be Toohey. Keating refuses her offer of an introduction precisely because he is so desperate to meet Toohey. Catherine is the one person that he does not want to use to further his ambitions, and he is honest with her about everything in his life.

After Roark has been working as a draftsman for Cameron for a month, Cameron calls him to his office and tries to fire him. Cameron wants to spare Roark from the suffering that he himself has endured as an architect, and he predicts that Roark will follow the same trajectory of disillusionment and despair. Roark does not balk at the prospect because he considers it a success to live up to the level of Cameron’s success. The browbeaten Cameron concedes and agrees to continue employing Roark and helping him grow.

A year passes, and Keating is now the favorite of both Francon and his partner, Heyers. Keating focuses his energy on advancing his own career by usurping Davis, and he then urges Stengel to start his own company, knowing that he will then be able to take Stengel’s job as lead designer. However, Keating still relies on Roark for help with his designs.

Meanwhile, Cameron’s company is no longer receiving any commissions, and both he and Roark are sinking into poverty. Roark is helpless to stop Cameron’s descent into alcohol addiction, and he refuses money from Keating when the latter tries to recruit him to Francon’s firm. Roark and Cameron work themselves to the bone to submit a design for a new branch of the Security Trust company, but despite assurances from their contact with the company, they are rejected. When informing Roark of the rejection, Cameron shows him a copy of The Banner tabloid newspaper, which is run by Gail Wynand, and says that the rejection of their design is inevitable in a world that supports such trash. Despairing, Cameron only wishes that he could have stayed in business until Roark was ready to begin working on his own.

In 1925, Toohey publishes Sermons in Stone, which is an immediate success and sensation. It tells the history of architecture by describing the everyday lives of laymen throughout the ages, making uneducated people feel like authorities with no real knowledge of the field. Meanwhile, Cameron collapses and is forced to retire. Roark closes Cameron’s office and burns all his papers for him, but he refuses to accept a reference letter.

Keating now lives with his mother. She wishes to set him up with Francon’s daughter, about whom Francon never speaks. Although Catherine’s attitude toward Keating is unchanged, she is preoccupied with doing administrative tasks for her uncle, such as answering his fan mail, and she is now reluctant to introduce Keating to Toohey. Keating proposes to an ecstatic Catherine but asks that they keep their engagement a secret for the time being.

At Keating’s request, Francon employs Roark as a draftsman. However, Roark refuses to contribute anything but engineering work, given Francon’s dedication to historical styles. Roark hates the constraints of the job but continues secretly helping Keating with his design work. Keating berates Roark for his inhuman stoicism and flaunts his own power arbitrarily in the office to compensate for the indignity of relying on Roark’s help. Roark enjoys visiting the construction sites and impresses one of the workers there with his practical knowledge. He forms a strong and lasting friendship with the worker, Mike, who also previously worked for and admired Cameron.

While Keating is away, Francon sends for Roark and asks him to submit designs for a client who wants a building in Cameron’s Modernist style. Roark, desperate for the job, begs Francon to allow him to submit his original design unaltered. This offends Francon, and Roark is fired. Roark has significant difficulty finding work, but he continues to refuse any help from Cameron when visiting him. One day, he sees an article by Gordon Prescott praising innovative architecture and sympathizing with the difficulties faced by young architects, but upon meeting with Prescott, Roark is criticized and dismissed once more.

Roark is finally employed as a Modernist by the architect John Erik Snyde, who employs draftsmen who each specialize in a different architectural style. He requires them to develop competing designs for each project, and then he combines their work into a single composite design. Meanwhile, the Buildings Trade Union goes on strike, supported by all but Wynand’s papers since Wynand himself has significant real estate investments that are jeopardized by the strike. Toohey agrees to risk Wynand’s wrath and his job at The Banner to speak at a mass meeting of strike sympathizers. For the first time, Catherine fails to attend a planned meeting with Keating because she is preoccupied with supporting Toohey. Keating joins her at the meeting hall, and they listen together to the beginning of Toohey’s speech in support of altruism and collectivism. The speech is hypnotic and revelatory, but it frightens both Catherine and Keating for a reason they cannot explain, so they leave.

Although many people expected Toohey to be punished for speaking out, Wynand instead offers him a regular column in The Banner. After the strike is resolved, Francon’s daughter, Dominique, writes a harsh critique of one of Keatings’s recent house designs in her own column for The Banner. When Francon calls her to his office to berate her, Keating is enamored of her beauty and refinement, although her cold laugh frightens him.

The wife of Ralston Halcombe, the president of the Architects’ Guild of America, runs a weekly salon that all prominent architects are pressured to attend. At one meeting, Keating pushes Francon to introduce him to Dominique, who claims to like Keating despite her own confusing and standoffish manner toward him.

A businessman named Austen Heller commissions Snyde to design him a house that he could love; he has already rejected three major architectural firms. Roark’s design of the house wins but is mangled by the incorporation of elements from the other sketches. Although Heller likes the final design, he laments that it is not integrated into the rocky stretch of shoreline where it sits. Roark redraws his original design atop Snyde’s final sketch and is immediately fired by his incensed boss, but Heller recognizes the perfection of Roark’s sketch and hires him to design the house independently, paying him in advance to set up an office and start the commission.

Roark opens his own small office. Keating wishes Roark luck but insists on pointing out the potential obstacles to his success, and he is perturbed by Roark’s refusal to join the Architects’ Guild of America. The now-infirm Cameron gives Roark his blessing and support but warns him that he will be facing a difficult battle to establish himself. Mike returns to New York specifically to work on the Heller house with Roark, who is liked by the workmen but not by the contractor’s superintendents. Roark briefly wonders at the difference between himself and others. When the house is completed, Heller adores it for its integrity, although most of the public mocks and criticizes the unique design.

Alvah Scarret is the editor-in-chief of Wynand’s The Banner. The paper’s current campaign is orchestrated against the landlord sharks who own the city slums. Dominique recently lived for two weeks in a slum tenement to investigate, and she wrote a series of articles on the subject. She criticizes the conditions when she attends dinner parties and then speaks of the tenants’ complicity in their poverty when she attends charity meetings. She refuses to head Scarret’s proposed Women’s Welfare Department, and she admits that she doesn’t care about the job or about the possibility of being fired. She values her freedom over everything and confesses that she wants to destroy anything she truly loves in order to spare it from the gaze of others. Because she is unable to find true perfection in this world, she instead embraces nothing, for she believes only in absolutes and refuses to settle for a compromise of any kind.

Francon pushes Keating and Dominique together and is delighted when they begin to see each other regularly. Keating dislikes her, and Dominique likes seeing him only because she doesn’t want to spend time with him; he fits her pursuit of “nothing” in place of the perfection she cannot find. One night, Catherine comes to Keating’s apartment and begs him to marry her as soon as possible. She was hit with a wave of terror while working in her uncle’s flat and is now convinced that if they don’t marry immediately, then they never will because something terrible will happen instead. Keating agrees but over the course of the night, his mother talks him out of it because she wants him to marry Dominique. The next morning, Catherine cheerfully agrees to postpone the wedding, and they part ways. In reality, each secretly hoped that the other would insist on the wedding.

Roark refuses to work for any client who expects him to copy historical styles or compromise on his designs. He agrees to build a filling station and a store for two self-made businessmen who come to him out of admiration for the Heller house. Mr. Sanborn commissions a house from Roark on Cameron’s recommendation, but although he himself likes Roark’s design, his wife opposes the whole venture. Opposition from the construction company and friction from Mrs. Sanborn slow the building process and increase the costs, until Mr. Sanborn is so exhausted that he cannot admit to liking the completed building. The Sanborns’ son, who is addicted to alcohol, is the only member of the family to take up residence there, and the venture is widely disparaged.

Keating and Catherine meet often, but their meetings have lost all sense of significance. Keating also meets frequently with Dominique, whom he desires, fears, and hates in turn. One night, he tries to kiss her, but she is completely unresponsive and admits that she has never felt desire. Despite her admission, he asks her to marry him, but she states that she would only ever marry him if she wanted to punish herself for something terrible. Heyer suffers a stroke, but he refuses to retire despite pressure from Francon, who would like to make Keating his partner in Heyer’s place. A competition is announced for architects to design the Cosmo-Slotnick Building, a skyscraper housing the New York headquarters for a famous Hollywood film company. Keating is encouraged to enter and gets Roark to help with his submission.

Roark receives no new commissions and is mocked in the press for his past work. He applies to build the home of Mr. Enright after reading that Enright had been dissatisfied with prior designers, but he is rejected by Enright’s secretary. Cameron suffers a relapse and is once more bed-ridden: this time, with no hope of recovery. He calls Roark to his bedside and tells him that he hates Wynand because of what The Banner represents. He states that Roark should keep fighting because Cameron’s own life has been worth the struggle. Roark stays with his mentor for three days, until Cameron dies.

Keating is terrified of losing the Cosmo-Slotnick Building competition and, with it, Francon’s faith and any chance of making him a partner. He goes to Heyer’s house with proof that Heyer previously embezzled money and tries to blackmail him into retiring. Keating’s threats scare Heyer so badly that he has a second stroke and dies. No one suspects Keating of foul play, and it is soon revealed that Heyer’s will has left everything to Keating. Soon afterward, Keating learns that he has won the Cosmo-Slotnick Building competition anyway; this immediately makes him a celebrity. He offers Roark half of the prize money in exchange for Roark’s silence on his role in the design, and he earnestly encourages Roark to play the political game like anyone else so that he can succeed. Roark is currently penniless; he has no work and the rent is past due, but he nonetheless returns Keating’s check in exchange for the same promise of silence from Keating since he also doesn’t want himself associated with the competition design. This infuriates Keating, who screams hysterically about how much he hates Roark.

Roark is offered a huge commission to design a bank building; he would only have to agree to small changes to the aesthetics of his design. He refuses to compromise and rejects the commission, even though it means that he must close his office and ask Mike to find him a job. He leaves to work in a quarry in Connecticut on the same night that Keating attends a celebratory dinner for having been made a partner of Francon’s firm.

Howard Roark has been working at the quarry for two months, exhausting himself with physical exertion and spending time in nature to better endure his suffering. Dominique Francon spends the summer in contented seclusion at her father’s house nearby. One day, she visits the quarry and sees Roark watching her with an insolent look of ownership that affects her viscerally. She makes immediate plans to leave the area and go traveling to escape his influence, but instead, she remains in the house and continues to make trips to the quarry. She asks Roark why he always stares at her, and he infuriates her by responding that it is for the same reasons that she stares at him.

Dominique spends several days distracting herself from Roark and refusing to return to the quarry, but then she concedes defeat in the invisible battle of wills by attempting to break the marble fireplace in her bedroom as an excuse to enlist Roark to remove the damaged stone and organize a replacement. Roark does so, casually speaking to her about the quality of the marble, and when the replacement stone arrives, he sends another man from the quarry to fit it rather than heeding Dominique’s summons himself. Dominique later pursues Roark to ask why he didn’t come himself, and she whips him across the face with a branch for mockingly saying that he didn’t think it would make a difference to her who did the job. Late that night, Roark breaks into Dominique’s bedroom, overpowers her, and violently rapes her. Dominique attempts to fight back but is utterly helpless, and she feels sexual pleasure for the first time in her life. Roark, still preoccupied with thoughts of Dominique, then receives a message from Enright asking to meet with him. He leaves for New York immediately. When Dominique finds out that he is gone, she sees it as an opportunity to escape his influence by refusing to learn his identity or seek him out.

Peter Keating mulls over the problem of choosing an artist to commission for a sculpture for the main lobby of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building, enjoying the power that this gives him over the artists. Steven Mallory had previously been given the job, but his sculpture of a heroic male figure was too grand for most people to appreciate since it made them feel mediocre by comparison, and Mallory was fired. Now, Keating receives a clipping of Ellsworth Toohey’s column for the following day’s Banner. The article heaps lavish praise on his design for the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. A handwritten note invites Keating to meet with Toohey, and this delights him further.

Keating is horrified to learn, however, that Toohey has narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by Mallory. Mallory later reveals in private that he was motivated by the threat that Toohey and his ideologies pose to people who are living independent, productive lives; however, his motive remains a mystery for the moment. Toohey treats the incident with baffled nonchalance and meets with Keating the following day. Keating is flattered and comforted by Toohey’s attitude of all-knowing kindliness and agrees to design a house for the famous writer Lois Cook, whose work he recommends that Keating read. Toohey mentions Keating’s engagement with Catherine as an afterthought and is slyly derisive toward Keating’s sincere declaration of love.

Keating reads Cook’s Clouds and Shrouds and adores it precisely because it is incomprehensible nonsense; the book affirms his own unspoken belief that the unknowable is worth more than that which can be understood. The book also justifies his rejection of self-advancement and his scorn for those who think rationally. When visiting Cook, he compliments her writing and agrees to design her a house that is deliberately ugly. The house receives praise as an artistic and intellectual experiment, but Keating retains an aftertaste of shame from working on it. Keating also meets with Catherine and Toohey together, and Toohey belittles and mocks their relationship under a veneer of kindness, making Keating feel doubtful of their love for the first time in Catherine’s presence. Toohey also interrogates Keating about Roark’s personality and values.

Dominique returns to New York and complains to Toohey that the architect of the Enright house—Roark—should have died by suicide rather than create something with so much integrity in an imperfect world. Uninvited, she attends a meeting that Toohey has organized for young architects, who declare themselves the “Council of American Builders” and unanimously vote Keating as their chairman. The architects listen enraptured as Toohey pontificates, and then Dominique upsets Keating by asking why Roark wasn’t invited. Keating attempts to kiss her, and for the first time, she reacts to his touch with revulsion rather than indifference. She tells him that one day he’ll know the truth about himself, and it’ll be worse for him than most. She claims that he reminds her of everything she hates about the world. She says that they should stop meeting and tells him that her saying so is the only act of kindness she has ever committed.

Mr. Enright is a generally unpopular self-made businessman who spent six months searching for an architect whose work he liked. When he discovered Roark, he fired his secretary for previously rejecting the young architect. Enright hires Roark, who reopens his office, hires several draftsmen on the basis of their skill alone, and obsesses over the project. Austin Heller pressures Roark into attending one of Mrs. Holcombe’s saloons in order to court a potential client, Mr. Sutton, who is considering him for a large commission. Roark agrees only upon learning that Dominique will be in attendance. Roark makes a generally unfavorable impression at the salon, and Keating, drunk on the attention he is receiving, futilely encourages Roark to learn to schmooze with clients like the rest of the city’s architects. Both Toohey and Dominique learn of Roark’s identity, and Dominique also recognizes him as the quarry worker who raped her. She and Roark make polite small talk, and she watches him while he otherwise ignores her. Dominique offhandedly calls him handsome, and Toohey declares at length that a human’s soul is visible in their face and in their reactions to the faces of others.

Despite admiring the Enright house, Dominique insults it viciously in her column. Toohey approves and suggests that they work together to deprive Roark of cherished commissions and then double the blow by redirecting those same clients toward Keating, whom he acknowledges as an inferior foil to Roark. Dominique ejects him from her office but ends up acceding to his plan by persuading Sutton to hire Keating instead. She visits Roark to boast of her victory, and he admits that the loss of the commission hurts him. He nonetheless pushes her to admit that she wants him to have sex with her as though she were his conquered foe, and they spend the night together. She confesses that it is Roark’s greatness that makes her want to destroy him.

Toohey visits Dominique and congratulates her on the success of her ongoing campaign to deprive Roark of commissions and win them for Keating. They agree on an alliance for the purpose of harming Roark, and Toohey states that it would have been better if men never advanced from caves compared to living in a city that emphasizes the inferiority of the majority. Dominique’s feud against Roark becomes public knowledge, but she frequently meets with him in secret to tell him of all the ways she has hurt him professionally and to have violent sex with him. She tells him that she wants to keep him hidden away from a world that would reject him. Keating tries to express his gratitude to Dominique for her seeming support of his career, but she refuses to speak with him. He continues to find comfort and contentment in his council meetings and burgeoning closeness with Toohey.

Toohey was born sickly and weak to a mother whose preference for him stemmed from how difficult he was to love. Through the course of his childhood, he weaponized his weakness to insult others with impunity, and he willingly martyred himself in order to harm his enemies. He became an expert public speaker in high school and planned to follow a career in the church before discarding his professed faith for socialism. Attending Harvard University, he attracted a sycophantic following of the weak, needy, and wealthy heirs who felt guilty for their privilege. He then took up a mentorship role that he used to pressure students into not pursuing their passions, making them dependent and weak. He built his influence and following and began to write architectural criticism because he found it to be an unexploited niche. After the publication of Sermons in Stone, he began writing a regular column for The Banner, in which he was contractually permitted to write whatever he wished. This arrangement afforded him an unprecedented opportunity to influence the opinions of the masses through The Banner’s millions of readers. He orchestrated the creation of councils of young experts in various fields, along with a club of Wynand employees, all of which are now beholden to him. His favorite of all the titles bestowed on him is that of “humanitarian.”

After the opening of the Enright house, Roark expands his office and employs a team of loyal draftsmen hired on the basis of their skill alone. Clients attracted by Roark’s previous work begin to approach him with commissions, including Kent Lansing, who fights tooth and nail against his board of directors to win Roark the contract to construct the luxurious Aquitania Hotel. Dominique continues to fight against Roark even though she is pleased with his success.

Hopton Stoddard is a sycophant of Toohey’s who is tormented by religious guilt. Toohey manipulates him into hiring Roark to build a temple and coaches him on how to approach Roark to compel him to agree to the commission. Roark is given full creative control over the design of the Stoddard Temple, a tribute to the human spirit, which is to be constructed in secret until its grand unveiling.

The Cosmo-Slotnick Building opens with a great ceremony, but the praise and adulation leave Keating feeling hollow. He seeks out Toohey, who reassures him that personal happiness is a vice and encourages him to pursue Dominique as a match over Catherine because personal love is discriminatory anyway.

Meanwhile, Roark attempts to commission the sculptor, Mallory—who was given a lenient two-year suspended sentence for his unexplained attack on Toohey—to create a nude sculpture representative of the human spirit. This sculpture will be the sole adornment for the Stoddard Temple. However, Mallory has been crushed by fear and rejection, and Roark is forced to track him down to his squalid flat to persuade him of his sincerity. Mallory is seduced by Roark’s independent spirit, his integrity, and his genuine interest in Mallory’s work and life. He says that he no longer feels afraid but that he now knows that a terror exists that Roark, as an innocent, cannot comprehend. He likens this unspecified terror to the act of facing down a nightmare beast that cannot be reasoned with and states that this is what motivated him to try and kill Toohey. He agrees with Roark’s suggestion that they use Dominique as the model for his sculpture. Roark, Mallory, Dominique, and Mike spend many nights together on the site of the Stoddard Temple as it is constructed, enjoying each other’s company and bonding over their shared values and interests. Work on the Aquitania Hotel is suddenly stopped, and although Lansing promises to untangle the financial issues among its owners, he warns a bereft Roark that it could take years. Dominique uses Toohey’s description of it as an “Unfinished Symphony” in one of her articles, leading to the widespread adoption of the monicker. Finally, the Stoddard Temple is complete.

Stoddard cancels the ceremony of the temple’s opening. Because Roark has designed the temple to elevate man and the human spirit rather than to pay homage to the concept of a deity, Toohey publicly lambasts the building as an insult to Stoddard’s faith while privately pressuring Stoddard to sue Roark for malpractice. In Wynand’s absence, Scarret, the editor of The Banner, leads a campaign against Roark that rouses public outcry. Both Toohey and Keating testify against Roark alongside many individuals representing the architectural establishment, although Keating is both drunk and conflicted. Dominique testifies against Roark, but her testimony actually praises the Stoddard Temple and advocates that they tear it down so that it cannot be desecrated by an unappreciative society. Roark doesn’t call witnesses or speak in his defense; he simply shows the judge photographs of the temple and rests his case.

Dominique demands that Scarret print her testimony from the Stoddard trial in her column and threatens to quit her job at The Banner if he does not comply. Scarret wires Wynand, who is still abroad, for guidance and receives a one-line message ordering him to fire her. Toohey gets wind of the reply and takes it to Dominique, mocking her for her weakness in essentially asking for mercy on the stand. She shows the wire to Scarret, who is apologetic, and as she leaves, she promises to do worse to herself than they can do to martyr her.

Catherine has spent the last few years becoming a social worker with her uncle’s help and is now entirely intellectually and ideologically dependent on him. She confesses to feeling miserable, and she also observes that her charity work is making her entitled and vicious toward those she is supposed to be helping. Toohey only chides her for caring about her own unhappiness and virtue and encourages her to forego rational thought and surrender her ego. She agrees, but then a guilt-stricken Keating visits her and begs her to forgive him on Roark’s behalf. She does, and they recognize each other’s suffering and unhappiness. Keating renews his offer of marriage after several years of increasing distance between them, and Catherine accepts. They plan to elope the following morning, and after Keating leaves, a weeping Catherine tells Toohey that she is no longer afraid of him.

Dominique visits Keating that same night and proposes to him, asking that he decide instantly because if he agrees, they will leave immediately and marry that night. She advises him to reject her, but he agrees instead, and they drive out to Connecticut to get married, feeling a sense of mutual understanding and the camaraderie of facing down a calamity together. On the return journey, Keating feels a violent desire for her, but she drops him off at his home and leaves, promising to return the following morning, at which point their life together will truly begin. She instead goes to Roark and sleeps with him before confessing to her marriage. She says that she is unable to allow herself happiness in a world where he can be desecrated by the power of people like Toohey. She explains that she has decided to live in shame and suffering instead. Roark is pained, but he accepts her decision because she needs to learn to not fear society and to live for herself before they can love each other properly and be together. He says that he loves her, and they part ways.

Dominique returns to Keating, and they receive many congratulations on their marriage. Francon is particularly happy and announces that he plans to retire soon, though he upsets Keating by seeking his approval rather than being proud and assured of his own worth. Toohey congratulates Keating and mocks Dominique; he incorrectly assumes that she married Keating because Roark never noticed her. Keating completes the renovations of the Stoddard Temple, and Catherine moves into a new home to work as an occupational therapist. The statue of Dominique is sold off, and Roark financially supports Mallory as a selfish luxury because he wants Mallory to have the freedom to create. Toohey confronts Roark when he goes to see the remodeled temple and asks Roark what he really thinks of him. Roark replies that he doesn’t think of Toohey at all.