"I know what you are." Kinnison's voice was uninflected, weary. "As I told you before—the Universe's best. It's what I am that's clogging the jets. What I have been and what I have to keep on being. I simply don't rate up, and you'd better lay off me, Mac, while you can. There's a poem by one of the ancients—Kipling—the 'Ballad of Boh Da Thone'—that describes it exactly. You wouldn't know it—"
"You just think that I wouldn't"—nodding brightly. "The only trouble is that you always think of the wrong verses. Part of it really is descriptive of you. You know, where all the soldiers of the Black Tyrone thought so much of their captain?"
She recited:
"And worshiped with fluency, fervor, and zeal
The mud on the boot heels of Crook O'Neil.
"That describes you exactly."
"You're crazy for the lack of sense," he demurred. "I don't rate like that."
"Sure, you do," she assured him. "All the men think of you that way. And not only men. Women, too, darn 'em—and the very next time that I catch one of them at it I'm going to kick her cursed teeth out, one by one!"
Kinnison laughed, albeit a trifle sourly. "You're raving, Mac. Imagining things. But to get back to that poem, what I was referring to went like this—"