“Interesting mangle!” Coleman smiled his thanks. “But Bishop Odo, I fear, wouldn’t even have spared you; not even for your good works. Still less for your good looks, which would only have provoked him to dwell with the more insistency on the visceral secrets which they conceal.”
“Really,” Rosie protested. She would have liked to get up and go away, but the Cossack’s blue eyes glittered at her with such a strange expression and he smiled so enigmatically, that she found herself still sitting where she was, listening with a disgusted pleasure to his quick talk, his screams of deliberate and appalling laughter.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands, “what sensualists these old fellows were! What a real voluptuous feeling they had for dirt and gloom and sordidness and boredom, and all the horrors of vice. They pretended they were trying to dissuade people from vice by enumerating its horrors. But they were really only making it more spicy by telling the truth about it. O esca vermium, O massa pulveris! What nauseating embracements! To conjugate the copulative verb, boringly, with a sack of tripes—what could be more exquisitely and piercingly and deliriously vile?” And he threw back his head and laughed; the blood-dabbled tips of his blond beard shook. Rosie looked at them, fascinated with disgust.
“There’s blood on your beard,” she felt compelled to say.
“What of it? Why shouldn’t there be?” Coleman asked.
Confused, Rosie felt herself blushing. “Only because it’s rather unpl—leasant. I don’t know why. But it is.”
“What a reason for immediately falling into my arms!” said Coleman. “To be kissed by a beard is bad enough at any time. But by a bloody beard—imagine!”
Rosie shuddered.
“After all,” he said, “what interest or amusement is there in doing the ordinary things in the obvious way? Life au naturel.” He shook his head. “You must have garlic and saffron. Do you believe in God?”
“Not m—much,” said Rosie, smiling.