A brief shadow flickers across his face at his words - was that what they had said? - but it clears up back into a more acceptable genteel calm. As he follows the beautiful courtesan up the stairs, he can feel anticipation and desire crowding out the darker, more pedestrian emotions he'd come in with, of inadequacy and failure and workaday anxiety.

Why shouldn't he indulge, just briefly? He wasn't truly Joshua Archer here within these walls, for the next two hours, wasn't a not-quite-starving, recognized but far from successful writer, who had a knack for making friends, but not customers or patrons.

He sits down obediently, takes a deep breath, inhaling the seemingly otherworldly scents of his surroundings, that feeling of truly being transported somewhere different. It was their stock in trade here at the Moulin Rouge, as so many things in this world were, everything carefully gilded and sparkling, a feast for the eyes and all other senses, so long as you didn't get too close, for too long.

He watches the shadows move on the ground, and feels a word drop into place in his mind like a wound, something to build around, layers of nacre spilled over and over.

"It seems a bit like gilding the lily," he replies, his gaze trailing up from stockinged legs and a trim waist, a plunging neckline and those dark, knowing eyes. He pushes himself up to his feet, takes a slow, deliberate step forward.