As a young woman, when she had been beautiful and had worn her hair short and her clothes loose to conceal that fact, she had known all the signs of men and read them well enough that she had been successfully robbed only three times and raped once; but none of those had burned from her the hunger for empty spaces, strange cities, new oceans.

He loved who he was: Randolph Carter, master dreamer, adventurer. To him, she had been landscape, an articulate crag he could ascend, a face to put to his place. When were women ever anything but footnotes to men's tales?

She had never met a woman from the waking world. Once she asked Carter about it."Women don't dream large dreams," he had said, dismissively. "It is all babies and housework. Tiny dreams."Men said stupid things all the time, and it was perhaps no surprise that men of the waking world might do so as well, yes she was disappointed in Carter.

She hadn't loved Randolph Carter. He had been a man like many, so wrapped and rapt in his own story that there was no room for the world around him except as it served his own tale: the black men of Parg and Kled and Sona Nyl, the gold men of Thorabon and Ophir and Rinar; and all the women invisible everywhere, except when they brought him drinks or sold him food - all walk-on parts in the play that was Randolph Carter, or even wallpaper.