"It doesnt matter,he said. Then there was a mouth clamped over his, a mouth which was unmistakably a womans mouth in spite of its hard spitless lips, and the wind from this womans mouth blew into his own mouth and down his throat, puffing his lungs, and when the lips were pulled back he smelled his warder for the first time, smelled her on the outrush of the breath she had forced into him the way a man might force a part of himself into an unwilling woman, a dreadful mixed stench of vanilla cookies and chocolate ice-cream and chicken gravy and peanut-butter fudge. Sidewinder was downhill and the road would be slippery in the rain and it was darker than a mineshaft; he meant to try it all the same. He had been dozing peacefully enough in front of his own fire with a book in his lap when Colter came, waking him up.
But he would do no such thing.
""Can you come up with a hundred and six bucks to go with the four hundred in my wallet? He had remained true enough to himself for art to imitate life however feebly — to the very end of Miserys hackneyed adventures.