I do not need to retract anything I said. Your admition that you misquoted me, is as equally deceptive, as your misquoting. I did not agree that what you claim as being central to your thesis, her inability to explain kindness, is accurate. I didn't even vaguely imply it. Thus I need not retract anything.
You then proceed to say in that phrase that it is so because kindness does not deserve to be talked about much.
I did not say or imply this either. What I did was restate your position that "Rand does nothing to explain kindness, either defining it away as a form of selfishness or pointing to its well known difficulty in discerning what it is," adding that it "may quite possibly be all the attention it deserves in her theory of ethics." Now it seems to me that if she defined it away as a form of selfishness and also pointed to its well known difficulty in discerning what it is, then she must have been explaining something substantial about it. But regardless of all that, I said that she "may quite possibly" have given it "all the attention it deserves in her theory of ethics." Now I would say that my words "may quite possibly" have a meaning that you completely ignored in drawing your conclusion as to what I had said. Furthermore, even if I had not included those words, which I did, a statement that she gave "kindness... all the attention it deserves in her theory of ethics," is not the same as stating that "kindness does not deserve to be talked about much," as you claim I was saying. There is a difference between the two.
But you qualify it by saying that the two men are equal in kindness. So your answer applies to the question which is absurd and which I did not ask.
The approximate question was asked twice by you in our exchange, with added criteria the second time it was asked. I used two paragraphs so as to distinguish between both askings. As for it being "absurd" I should like to ask you a question. Two men again are the main characters, both equal in all respects with the exception that the first is a generous kind man who regularly gives his extra money to help the needy, while the second is a greedy self centered scrooge who never gives a dime, using his extra money as kindling to start fires in his fire place, after throwing out his mornings newspaper. But on this occasion, the first ignores a request for help, and instead goes home, throws out the morning newspaper and uses his extra $100 to start a fire in the fireplace. It is the second one, who gives the the man in need his extra $100. Is the first man still the more virtuous? Or has all that he has done before been erased away? Is the second man now more virtuous? Which one do we call the kind man? Is the other (which one) not a kind man? Do we call him an unkind man?
The first man acts kindly most of the time and greedily some time, the second man vice versa. The first then is mostly kind and the second mostly greedy.
So what was that "quality of virtue" in 235?