Mallory collapsed off of her and lay blowing like a beached 
cetacean in the foetid air. His muscles felt like rubber, and 
he'd half-sweated the whisky off with the sheer work of it. He 
felt utterly wonderful. He felt quite willing to die. If the tout 
arrived and shot him dead on the spot he would somehow have welcomed 
it, welcomed the opportunity never to come back from that plateau of 
sensibility, the opportunity never to be Edward Mallory again, but 
only a splendid creature drowned in cunt and tea-rose
     --Gibson/Sterling, from The Difference Engine