"Today they had dived together to swim and Wynand had climbed back first. As he stood at the rail, watching Roark in the water, he thought of the power he held in this moment: he could order the yacht to start moving, sail away and leave that redheaded body to sun and ocean. The thought gave him pleasure: the sense of power and the sense of surrender to Roark in the knowledge that no conceivable force could make him exercise that power. Every physical instrumentality was on his side: a few contradictions of his vocal chords giving the order and someone’s hand opening a valve—and the obedient machine would move away. He thought: It’s not just a moral issue, not the mere horror of the act, one could conceivably abandon a man if the fate of a continent depended on it. But nothing would enable him to abandon this man. He, Gail Wynand, was the helpless one in this moment, with the solid planking of the deck under his feet. Roark, floating like a piece of driftwood, held a power greater than that of the engine in the belly of the yacht. Wynand thought: Because that is the power from which the engine has come."