She leaned against the bed, soft as a fleece, yielding her head to her father's painful fondling.

If his love-affairs stopped short of the gratification of the senses, they involved a perpetual fondling and caressing of those effeminate sensibilities of his into that condition of hyper-aesthesia which, though Sterne regarded it as the strength, was in reality the weakness, of his art.

Indeed, she hugged and squeezed the squirming Mumbles until he resented such strenuous fondling and escaped to Patsy's more moderate embraces.

What is more tender than a mother's love To the sweet infant fondling in her arms?