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Ada’s sentence on souci d’eau then carries on to suggest synonyms Fowlie could have used, such as “mollyblob, marybud, maybubble.” Marybud does mean “marigold,” and May blob “marsh marigold,” but the invented “mollyblob” and “maybubble” point instead to Molly Bloom’s famous musing on what a character in Ada will later term “popping the hymen” (523): “and they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools too you could be a widow or divorced 40 times over a daub of red ink would do or blackberry juice no thats too purply” (Ulysses 633, 18.1125-28). Nabokov confirms the allusion to this most celebrated of interior monologues by introducing as topics of Ada’s arcane disquisitions “a natural history wonder, a special belletristic device-- . . . monologue intérieur” (61). ( Part One, ch. 10, Afternote: ADA on Line, B.Boyd)
