Dalliance

While Tom puttered about with his ruffles and dalliance, a musket ball was flying towards his forehead.

As in the season of rutting (an uncouth phrase, by which the vulgar denote that gentle dalliance, which in the well-wooded forest of Hampshire, passes between lovers of the ferine kind),

But, with a gesture, she put a period to this dalliance—one shouldn't palter so on an empty stomach, she might almost have said.

Quite a few minutes would be spun out, for instance, at the smallish town of Chirk, but to me the dalliance was generally worthwhile, except in wet weather, because of the increasing beauty of the wooded hill scenery thereabouts.