she was financially secure during the period you say, but that financial security was bought by selling her labor to people whose values she did not share. This is discussed at length in both of the Rand biographies written by the Brandons. that is why the issue of “secondhand lives” is so important for the Fountainhead. In fact that was the working title while it was being written.

Once the Fountainhead was successful, she conveniently forgot about the issue of secondhand lives, and the anguish and injustice it cost people like Henry Cameron. She then decided, generalizing from her own case, that everyone who was rich deserved to be rich, and so property rights became the basis of all of her ethics. this is completely incompatible with her defense of Roark’s blowing up a building he did not own. that action was what I meant by “using force to produce justice“.