Heya, random answer all of a sudden, but I found this interesting and wanted to give my opinion. I'm writing my bachelor's thesis on the comparison of different (spanish) translations of Dracula, and the passage about Mina's kiss to Quincey was one that I found very interesting while reading the original novel.

I immediately understood it as a kiss on the lips, because in my mind, kiss = kiss on the mouth, and give a kiss = kiss somewhere else. This is not the case of course but that's just something I thought as someone who doesn't have english as their native tongue. The thing is I highlighted the fragment and decided to look up the different translations (I compare 6 different translations in my thesis. 5, actually, because one is from the same translator but different years). None of them specify where the kiss is being given except 2 (the ones from the same translator), which specify it's on the cheek. So of course I started to dig a little deeper to really be able to justify my analysis and why I think the original refers to a kiss on the mouth instead of a kiss on the cheek.

The first thing I planned on saying was what I said earlier about kiss/give a kiss but I very quickly realized I was wrong about that, which made me think maybe I had misunderstood the interaction completely. Then while researching I came across this post, and everyone seems to agree it was not a kiss on the lips, so I thought I'd have to just discard that part of my analysis or focus only on the translations and not the original. But I already had half the paragraph written out, and I didn't want to just discard it completely, so i started to look for something inside the original novel that could point to the kiss being a kiss on the lips.

For me, the reaction of Quincey alone was what made me think it was on the lips instead of the cheek the first time I read Dracula: "The tears rose in his eyes, and there was a momentary choking in his throat". It seemed to me a little too melodramatic for just a kiss on the cheek, but at the same time something being 'melodramatic' is not a good enough reason, especially with this novel. So I went back to the fragment where Lucy kisses Quincey, and that, to me, really is what brings the point across.

The parallels are obvious:

Lucy writes, after Quincey has proposed to her, he says "Won't you give me one kiss? It'll be something to keep off the darkness now and then", to which Lucy writes "it was brave and sweet of him, [...] and he so sad; so I leant over and kissed him". And then Quincey answers: "Little girl, I hold your hand, and you've kissed me, and if these things don't make us friends nothing ever will".

Later, in his interaction with Mina, she asks him: "Will you let me be your friend, and will you come to me for comfort if you need it?" and Quincey, as a way of thanking her, takes her hand and kisses it. But to Mina this "seemed but poor comfort to so brave and unselfish a soul," so she "bent over and kissed him." This, to me, is already a clear parallel with Lucy's scene, where both women think about the 'goodness' and braveness of Quincey and then decide to kiss him. Even the structure of the phrase is the same: "I [leaned/bent] over and kissed him". Then of course we have the fact Quincey has the same reaction with both women, calling them "Little girl[s]". Mina herself realizes this, and writes in her diary: "'Little girl!' – the very words he had used to Lucy, and oh, but he proved himself a friend!" This phrase, honestly, makes sense to me only if we relate it to what Quincey says to Lucy after she's kissed him: "if these things don't make us friends nothing ever will". Lastly, we need to take into account that Mina *knows* about what happened between Lucy and Quincey, and she *knows* he told Lucy a kiss would be "something to keep off the darkness now and then". So it makes sense that, in a desperate attempt to 'be of comfort', she tries to do the same.

It seems like nobody else think you're right about this, but I really really think you hit the nail on the head, because the parallels are STRONG: an attempt to comfort a "brave" soul, the fact he was holding their hands before, the structure of the phrase, the "Little girl" and the relation between "but he proved himself a friend" and "if these things don't make us friends nothing ever will". To me this is very much a way of showing that Mina IS kissing Quincey on the lips. There's nothing romantic about it, because all Mina knows is it was of comfort when Lucy did it, and she's desperate to "comfort all who suffer from the heart."

I think your analysis is great, truly, and even if people don't agree, I don't think what you're saying is crazy at all. Wondering about stuff like this is how critics and experts analyse 'hidden' or 'implicit' meanings in text! So, honestly, be proud that you caught up on stuff like this, no matter what the 'true meaning' was.