Individualism: Solomon and Roark Ice Cream Parlor.

King Solomon, paraphrased: "There is an evil I have seen, that a man toils his day and then others eat the fat thereof."  (According to, what was then, one of the very wealthiest men in the world.  Adoni Zedek, that is to say Rabbi or teacher, half-bird as he was, would have savaged him from above with his monstrous claws...)

Howard Roark tumble-turding out of a prestigious career, fed not by well-earned salary, but by the thin sustenance of his own individualistic principles.  His career had lost a prong, as such to be mortified into sickness, as a matter of servicing the integrity of one's own belief(consequences be damned!), had star-fished-off a new appendage, like the evil seven-headed hydra of the Revelation, one as if to die, but then what?

Another talentless hoogah-boo(for there are yet other times, opportunities and places for such intellectual invisibility) and the integrity of Roark that was such that his principles bent slightly, that he didn't put name to his work, but the work was the point, be it alchemizing mud into brick in a claypit, or blue-printing a new kind of building.

And then, for the very wealth of being a "ghost-architect", and not the reputation as a designer, for he had chucked reputation into some dark corner and took it not, still, as a reason de'entre.

Rugged individualism/self-centeredness, then partly comes unraveled.  Of this I hold that I wouldn't want to be like a lot of people out there, and by that same thinking, myself a work-in-progress, I wouldn't want, either, too many people to be particularly like me......  for what are we but varities in an existential ice-cream shop?

Self-absorbed non-productive wealthy house-sitter, which thwarts the narrative of the story in my wot:
sauntering along one indolent stupid afternoon, she happens to catch sight of Roark with his shirt off, and according to Ayn Rand, the indolent women almost instantly feel in love with the principles of the man.

A girl,
I say,
in an old Chevrolet,
and she's slowing down
to take a look at me.

All the usefulness of rancid hamburger grease-the trust fund girl-and Roark suitably compartmentalized in his thinking faculty that he never notices that he simply likes her drapes--why if he were more round in his thinking, he would quickly see that her very existence disproved everything he believed about purpose, intellectual property, and life such as it is.