In his mind he made himself get down off the ledge and go outside to help Dina with her bags, then to see if there was anything his mother needed; he spoke to the maid in complete sentences, and remembered to clean the dust from his own shoes when he came back inside. Naked in the dark, with the memory of the Hand's reptilian eyes, he realized that the ritualized world he had dismissed as feminine was in fact civilization.

Autor: G. Willow Wilson