Dab

dab
verb, transitive. To press against something lightly with a piece of absorbent material in order to clean or dry it. To apply a substance with light quick strokes. To aim at or strike with a light blow. Also a noun.

Hunched over the worktable, Joshua dabbed at the plate and sourly considered his options. Priscilla had not only refused his proposal, she had refused it angrily. He had been so taken aback, he had not thought to ask her why. It couldn’t be his prospects, he thought. He was a journeyman printer now and could look forward to owning his own shop someday. He wasn’t bad-looking....

He put the rag down, then noticed his ink-blackened fingers. Was that it? His perpetually-stained hands? Surely Priscilla wasn’t so short-sighted as to reject him because of the marks his trade left on his body.

She was so neat and clean, Joshua thought as he wrestled the plate onto the press and clamped it. Maybe she feared that his hands would stain her clothes, her skin. Maybe he should forget her and find a woman whose standards would not be so ... petty.

He felt an agony of loss. How could he forget Priscilla? Whenever he saw her--on the street, in a shop--the sun itself seemed to blaze from her hair and eyes. No, forgetting her was impossible.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.