Butterfly Stories

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In case any of you readers happens to be a member of the Public, that mysterious organization that rules the world through shadow-terrors, I beg you not to pull censorious strings merely because this book, like one or two others of mine, is partly about that most honest form of love called prostitution — a subject which the righteous might think exhausted with a single thought — or, better yet, no thought at all — but the truth is that there are at least thirteen times as many different sorts of whores as there are members of the Public (and I think you know what I mean by members). Shall we pause to admire them all (the adults, I mean, the ones with the ambitiously long-tubed mouthparts)? Looking under the trees I spy billions of species, most of whom fly only during the night, unlike the insects after whom they're named; the pupa stage is often enclosed in a cocoon of brightly colored silk. And yet some are alive and some are dead and some find money to be the least of their worries! — Oh, my prismatic Nymphalidae, my cross-veined Psychidae, my Sesiidae with the delicious anal veins, how could cruelly unimaginative lepidopterists have pinned you to a common corkboard of classification, when after all the world is so shadily large? I'll not commit that crime! So fear repetition not; there remain many seas of blood and cream to be traversed. If this advertisement be not sufficient, I can only protrude my wormlike tendrils of apology, craving forbearance on the grounds that a writer must write about what he knows, and since I know nothing about any subject it scarcely matters where I dabble.

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