He is not going to throw up again. His stomach is perfectly empty, and steel enough besides not to be troubled by simply the mention of rancid stinking half pickled fish jiggling in the gel of its own rot, pearlescent white gobbets of mucus textured fat oozing up through the—what color is herring?—white flesh of the fish, and bursting under the teeth and across the tongue.

So anyway, when he has puked again and has folded the hat back between his hands, he says very genially (if one can be genial and so green) to her, "You might just kill me. It would be kinder."