A good ice cream lulls in the mind in the same way, almost, and there is about it the sweet intoxication of virtue

The Islamic warriors did not see anything to enrage them. The bar did not exist. The women were not 'exposed'. There was just the mall itself, where I sat down at last to eat an ice cream under the smiles of the headscarfed girls who served them. Ice cream. Isn't ice cream always the substitution for a nice beer, from 'dry' Islamabad to 'dry' Ocean City, New Jersey?  A good ice cream lulls in the mind in the same way, almost, and there is about it the sweet intoxication of virtue.

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013), 173-4