Two of the other parsons of the neighbourhood, who were standing and talking with their backs to the group which the vicar of Dulham had joined, turned round and chuckled at the pompous tone of this last sentence.
‘Your ‘Catholic’ faith, Bristley,’ said one of them, who was an old friend of the Dulham family, ‘is a very whole one, we all know, and I suppose undefiled. It consists, if I mistake not, of uncompromising woman-worship. Well, why not? I’m devoted to the ladies myself. Eh, Lesbia?’
‘You! I’m afraid, Mr Smeeth,’ answered Lesbia, ‘that your precious devotion is mollycoddle.’
‘Pon my sawl—aw—that’s too bad, Miss Newman,’ put in Athelstan Lockstable, who had just joined them. ‘When all these ages poets have been singing the praises of Lawve, you know, and—’
‘Yes,’ she cut him short, ‘poets have been singing, and marriage bells have been ringing, and novel-writers have been scribbling, and nightingales have been dribbling, and troubadours have been sighing, and chaperones have been plying—it’s all quite too utterly awfully chawming, you know. But, for all that, the master passion’s rarely anything more noble that what I call mollycoddle.’
‘You're a funny girl, Lesbie,’ said Lady Humnoddie, ‘a very funny girl altogether.’
‘Perhaps so,’ answered Lesbia; ‘but though you'll say I’m young to judge, I don’t imagine I shall ever be much addicted to mollycoddle.’
‘But come, Lesbia, what is mollycoddle, after all? Do you apply that name to every kind of love?’ asked Mr Smeeth.
‘Oh! by no means, I do not call either tried affection or real woman-worship by that name. Mollycoddle is the feeling experienced by empty-headed young women and emptier-headed young men, when they flirt and spoon and
