He held a vast but carefully concealed distaste for all things American. Their incredible polytheistic babel of religions, of course, although they were hardly to be blamed for that . . . their cooking (cooking!!!), their manners, their bastard architecture and sickly arts . . . and their blind, pathetic, arrogant belief in their superiority long after their sun had set. Their women. Their women most of all, their immodest, assertive women, with their gaunt, starved bodies which nevertheless reminded him disturbingly of houris.