One item that Dr. Glenholm Jolly had wished he could broach with Dr. Cobb, but had decided to save for later, was a curious development which had arisen in Moorsex county. Indeed, it seemed to Jolly to coincide with the very first display of the ancient Antarctic seedlings over in Hipkiss Conservatory beginning in 1913. Over the past six years, it seemed to jolly that the womenfolk of Moorsex had ... changed, somehow. In fact, there was a mysterious foreign body found throughout the cell structure of the new exotic flowers, and Jolly had detected much the same foreign body in tissue samples from many a Moorsex women. There seemed to be a kind of infection going on, but one that actually enhanced vitality and beauty rather than sapping them. Jolly hated to admit it, but the womenfolk of Moorsex had become more curvaceous, more voluptuous, even more, if he dared admit it, more sexually aggressive.
In fact, perhaps the most obvious case of all was his 22-year-old daughter, Angelica Jolly, who at that very moment was wandering happily through Hipkiss Conservatory in the company of her good friend Emma Watkins. Emma was a very bookish young woman, suitably aspiring to become a librarian, although she was inspired by the exploits of such women as Mary Henrietta Kingsley and secretly desired more than anything to be some kind of scientist-explorer, much like Moorsex's own hero, the mysteriously vanished Manly Cobb.
"Father thinks these amazing flowers are infecting us with beauty, isn't that silly?"
Emma just smiled, but had her own worries. She remembered Angelica as an awkward and rather plain girl. Today her beauty was simply devastating -- so entrancing as to awaken strange stirrings within Emma herself -- and the outrageous curves of her hips and buttocks, as conservatively attired as they were, were overshadowed only by her simply massive out-thrust wedge of bosom. Truth to tell, Emma herself had become bountifully bosomy compared to any average woman of her age and stature, but Angelica was perhaps the most abundantly blessed in all Moorsex. That such delicate porcelain beauty should match such lush hotness of beauty constantly left Emma a little off balance in Angelica's presence.
"Then again," pressed Angelica, "Father sometimes blames our advanced sexual development on D. H. Lawrence and the suffragette movement!"
"It's only fair," Emma murmured. "As it is we already vote far more on men's day to day existence than they even recognize."
Angelica laughed. "How very true. Speaking of men -- do you have one lined up?"
"Angelica -- I'm not like you. I can't go through men like ... like ... chocolates!"
"That's not a fair comparison, Emma. You don't even let yourself go through chocolates like men."
Emma sighed. She loved Angelica, in her way, but always found her to be a bit superficial. She studied the flowers, and again thought of Manly Cobb. |