But they still act as if there is no greater enemy than this slight woman with flowers in her hair.

The girl's delicacy [delicate health] has always worried her parents.

She's a slight woman, with a firm, clear, but soft-spoken voice, a direct look and a ready smile.

Is scientific scholarship perhaps only a fear and an excuse in the face of pessimism, a delicate self-defence against - the Truth?

And the advances in synthetic biology required to transform those first delicate mirror cells into anything that could survive in the wild are even more remote.