‘Well,’ William of Roscrea says finally, the sweat on his back turning cold from inaction, his tunic sticking to him, ‘he says because we, he means you and I, or our people, are engaged in eliminating the family, which I suppose does mean his tribe, maybe, and do place youth as an attribute to be eternally guarded and envious of – I suppose when he speaks of he, he means his tribe, or the McMurroughs, or all of them, I’m not certain at all – and because we do not claim our children as our own if they are out of the strictest bonds of wedlock, but yet engage in much licentious freedoms with infected, unpropertied French whores, often infamous for their pestilential barrenness and knotty wombs, our mode of attraction has become warped, and that which we find attractive has become some non-fertile thing, because our women are applauded for their lack of fertility and dying in birth, for that does free up much bonds and property, and the applause does stretch to their unvirile lack of voracity regarding marital duties that they, our women, can only regard with trauma and revulsion. Therefore the women we find attractive are non-fertile, thin, childish and white, amorphous androgynes, strange weakling beasts who die of minor fevers or get caught in drizzly showers and then tremble to death in the autumns and dark solstices from the dampness within their clothes; women who cannot compose poetry or turn backwards calves in the womb or participate in any land disputes, or even cross rivers or small hills without pausing to take breath or to die, and because our women cannot give birth without dying themselves, they claim that these unlively properties do stretch to our menfolk and that, of course, it is impossible for us, with such a sickly culture as we do possess, to appreciate such a fine and beautiful passage as the woman round his neck does display, which has been carved for him by his own lively wife, so why bother explaining their healing properties when a beautiful woman in an eternal prime, which is the age of all women if their souls be strong, could only scare our kind?