“How ardent you are,” Tamara said theatrically. “Tonight you are my ardent lover. Tonight we are gentry and animals, birds and lizards, slime and marble. Tonight we are glorious and degraded, knighted and crushet, beautiful and disgusting. Sweat is perfume. Gasps are bells. I wouldn’t trade this for the ravages of the loveliest swan. This is why I must have come to you in the first place. This is why I must have left the others, the hundreds who tried to stay my ankle with crippled hans as I sped to you.” “Horseshit,” I said.