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More "Wilfulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so long as the genial spirits of youth lasted, Pope's life must have been one dream of pleasure. He tells Lord Harvey that his mother did not spoil him; but that was no doubt because there was no room for wilfulness or waywardness on either side, when all was one placid scene of parental obedience and gentle filial authority. We feel persuaded that, if not in words, in spirit and inclination, they would, in any notes they might have occasion to write, subscribe themselves "your dutiful parents." And of ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the thoughts that occupied the king on his bed of pain, and upon which he dwelt with all the wilfulness and moodiness of a ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... 'I—I—did not know you were here, sir!' she began. 'I was out for a little walk.' She could get no further; her eyes filled with tears. That spice of wilfulness, even hardness, which characterized her in Jim's company, magically disappeared in the presence of ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... Marthe, I implore you—get up and dress yourself. It's for your own interest that I ask you to do it, for your luxury, for your comfort. What will become of you if, by a mere whim, by naughty wilfulness, we are to ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... which robbed her of what her instinct told her was the surest weapon for combating deception. Them, however, and their acting she could have with stood enough to silently discredit them through sheer virulence of a hatred that proved them to be duly credited. But her savage wilfulness could not resist the look of Marko. She had to yield up her breast to the truth, and stimulate further unbelief lest her loaded heart should force her to run to the wounded lion's bedside, and hear his reproaches. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Mrs. Blacklock told a pitiful story of the wilfulness of her son; that she was obliged to do just as he said, and if he wanted anything, however absurd it might be, she was obliged to give it to him, or he made the house too "hot" for her. Her husband had died when the children were small, and the whole care ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... tender remonstrance; but the slightest insinuation of a difference of opinion was sufficient to fan the embers of Henrietta's distemperature into a conflagration. The blaze was not strong, indeed; for the lady had always been accustomed to find a fit of wilfulness, or of affected despondency, more available and becoming than one of hasty anger. But she was tolerably expert in those piquant flippancies of speech which harass the enemy like a straggling fire; and could contrive, when it suited ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... another of my headstrong boys," grumbled Lady Augusta. "They are all specimens of wilfulness. I never knew that it was this morning he intended to be off, until he was gone, and I had to run after him to the station. ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... 1790 a youth destined to lend even greater interest than Paoli to that name—"Corsica has been a prey to the ambition of her neighbors, the victim of their politics and of her own wilfulness.... We have seen her take up arms, shake the atrocious power of Genoa, recover her independence, live happily for an instant; but then, pursued by an irresistible fatality, fall again into intolerable disgrace. For twenty-four centuries these are the scenes which recur ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... From his father he inherited the love of brilliant society, from his mother the love of music and an unusually sensitive temperament. When he was but two and a half years old his mother died and he became the idol of his grandmother, by whom he was spoiled, until the wilfulness of youth became the arrogance and domineering quality so distinguishing his maturity. Being a delicate child, his grandmother took him at the age of ten to the Caucas,—which he deeply loved ever after. In 1827 he was placed in the Adelige ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... he had confessed his doubts and scruples—some momentary inattention at prayer, a movement of trivial anger in his soul, or a subtle wilfulness in speech or act—he was bidden by his confessor to name some sin of his past life before absolution was given him. He named it with humility and shame and repented of it once more. It humiliated and shamed him to think that he would never be freed from it wholly, however holily he might live ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... his brain had been slower, his hand also would have been slower to strike. But his intelligence had been surcharged with hate these many years, and since the day he had been deserted it had ceased to control his actions—a passionate and reckless wilfulness had governed it. But now, after the first shock and stupefaction, it seemed to go back to where it was before Marcile went from him, gather up the force and intelligence it had then, and come forward again to this supreme moment, with all that life's harsh experiences had ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... was indeed deep rooted. Whatever heart she had not frivoled away in wilfulness had been caught and won by Forsythe, the first grown man who had ever dared to make real love to her. Her jealousy of Margaret was the most intense thing that had ever come into her life. To think of him looking at Margaret, talking to ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... for me," replied Mrs. Baynton, in a depressed tone. "What with her delicate health, and what with her wilfulness, I have always had trouble with her. Dr. West was the only one—But I can't refer to those matters. Flore is broken-hearted. Poor Flore! she has never given me an hour's grief in her life. Kitty has given me little else. And now to ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... maiden, who, for all her wilfulness, was timid as a bird, drew close to the knight and whispered, 'Are you also angry ...
— Undine • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... asked she with a toss of her gold locks and a pout of her red lips which was childishness and wilfulness itself, but there went along with it a glance of her eyes which puzzled me, for suddenly a sterner and older spirit of resolve seemed to look out of them into mine. "Think you I am in my dotage, Master Wingfield, that I remember not the day?" said she, "and think you ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... system, or any given part of it,—or by a determined act of wilfulness, you may, even though perceiving a ray of light, reject it in anger and disgust:—but this I will say,—that if you once master it, or any part of it, you cannot hesitate to acknowledge it as the truth. You cannot ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... great outbreak of the spirit of this civilization was in republican Greece; the martyrdom of Socrates, the fearless Utopianism of Plato, the ambitious encyclopaedism of Aristotle, mark the dawn of a new courage and a new wilfulness in human affairs. The fear of set limitations, of punitive and restrictive laws imposed by Fate upon human life was visibly fading in human minds. These names mark the first clear realization that to a large extent, and possibly to an illimitable extent, ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... your own hearts, or by solitary instances; and you forget the inevitable downward course of wrong tendencies. Besides, she has neither lofty principle nor a strong will. You will think I mistake here; but I don't mean she has not wilfulness enough. A strong will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... jostled him, till my uncle lost all patience, shook himself clear of Rosalie, who fell fainting to the ground, knocked each of his adversaries down in turn, and walked home to his quarters, very much disgusted with the world in general, and the wilfulness of French young ladies in particular. Of course he knew perfectly well it was not to end here. He sent for Grape, then a brother subaltern, and placed his ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... clinched his hands, and sat like a hero. Ted knelt beside him, white as a sheet, and as weak as a girl; for the pangs of remorse were rending him, and his heart failed at the thought of all this pain because of his wilfulness. It was all over in a moment, with only one little groan; but when Nan looked to her assistant to hand the water, poor Ted needed it the most, for he had fainted away, and lay on the floor in a pathetic ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... often hateful to himself; but there was an ecstasy in the conception, as if delight could be mingled with horror. I think, however, he struggled to master the fatality, and that his resolution to marry was dictated by an honourable desire to give hostages to society, against the wild wilfulness ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... world exists, and to whom the Christian doctrine of love is but the expression of his own experience. For a century or more our world, confident in its strength, its reason, its knowledge, has been undermining that doctrine with every possible heresy. In sheer wilfulness it has tried to empty life of all its values. It has made us ashamed of loving anything; for all love, it has told us, is illusion produced by the will to live, or the will to power, or some other figment of its own perverse thought. And now, as a result of that perversity, ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... faster. Christ can crowd the work of years into hours. He did it with the dying thief. If the man who has set out early may take his time, it certainly cannot be so with us who have lost our time. If we have lost God's bright and happy presence by our wilfulness, what then? Unrelieved sadness? Nay, brethren, calmness, purity, may have gone from our heart; but all is not gone yet. Just as sweetness comes from the bark of the cinnamon when it is bruised, so can the spirit of the Cross of Christ bring beauty and holiness and peace out of the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... had been so from the first moment of her widowhood, the truth being that she was jealous of their legal powers over Aileen's fortune and destiny, and determined, notwithstanding, to have her own way with her own child. The wilfulness and caprice of the father, which had taken such strange and desperate forms in Rose Delaney, appeared shorn of all its attraction and romance in the smaller, more conventional, and ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... she was. She knew, now, the wilfulness of her sins, and the merciful interposition of the river's inviolable strength. Her sight of the mission boat had awakened in her soul the knowledge that she must go out and talk to the good man on board, confess her naughtiness, ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... most diabolical act of cruelty she could imagine was that of baking alive in a hot oven one of the ducks. And that was what she did. The sequence of thought in her mind was that the spell that had been laid on the ducks was that of preternaturally wicked wilfulness; that this spell could only be broken through intensity of suffering, in this case death by burning; that the intensity of suffering would break the spell in the one roasted to death; and that the spell broken in one would be altogether broken, that is, in all the ducks.... Shocking, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... the same level way as before. 'Here is your patron, your master. He is willing to take you back, my dear, if you are sensible of the favour and choose to go. You can be, again, a foil to his pretty daughter, a slave to her pleasant wilfulness, and a toy in the house showing the goodness of the family. You can have your droll name again, playfully pointing you out and setting you apart, as it is right that you should be pointed out and set apart. (Your birth, you know; you must not forget ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... asking, "What, then, is pietas? Surely it is with those who know not war; who keep at peace with all men; who love their enemies and count all men their brethren; who can control their anger and curb all mental wilfulness." And once again, pietas is the main ingredient in iustitia, that is, in Christian righteousness, for "pietas nihil aliud est quam Dei notio." Even here it is not so far removed from its old meaning; but in a Christian writer it can mean conformity to the ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... regretted the challenge in those words. Fleur was smiling. In this age, when young people prided themselves on going their own ways and paying no attention to any sort of decent prejudice, he had said the very thing to excite her wilfulness. Then, recollecting the expression on Irene's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... augmented if Anne had declared herself favourable to the Indulgence. Which side she might take depended on the will of others. For her understanding was sluggish; and, though there was latent in her character a hereditary wilfulness and stubbornness which, many years later, great power and great provocations developed, she was as yet a willing slave to a nature far more vivacious and imperious than her own. The person by whom she was absolutely ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Bayle. Whereas honest Tom Tusher never permitted his mind to stray out of the prescribed University path, accepted the Thirty-nine Articles with all his heart, and would have signed and sworn to other nine-and-thirty with entire obedience. Harry's wilfulness in this matter, and disorderly thoughts and conversation, so shocked and afflicted his senior, that there grew up a coldness and estrangement between them, so that they became scarce more than mere acquaintances, from having been intimate friends when they came to college first. ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... her foot on the ground, while a hot flush arose in her cheeks. Her sisters, young girls as they were, could not understand her moods, either of wild mirth, eager delight in poetry and music, childish wilfulness and petulant temper or deep melancholy, all coming in turn with feverish alternation and vehemence. As the ladies approached the castle they were met by various gentlemen, among whom was Maitre Alain Chartier, and a bandying of compliments ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... home said a word of blame to Gertrude. There was no need. They had heard the whole story and they only pitied her, and her grief was far greater than their own, they thought, for there was no self-blame, no shadow of deception, no regret of wilfulness in their sorrow. Even Conway felt unutterably tender towards this least dear of his sisters, when he came in from a fruitless errand, and found the proud, dark head resting on little Maud's high chair, while Gertrude's whole ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... thought. Perhaps it was not only the presence of a Ranger in town that gave him concern, nor the wilfulness of his daughter. There must be internal strife in the rustler gang with which we ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... something still unfledged—a tall, slim, overgrown girl of sixteen, and somewhat spoiled. This was indeed only natural, for her immediate world of father, aunt, and relations had circled ever since her birth in the orbit of her charming wilfulness. Champney acknowledged to himself that he had done her bidding a little too frequently ever since the first yachting trip, when as a little girl she attached herself to him, or rather him to her as a part of her special goods and chattels. At that time their common ground for conversation ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... confession be public, that warning may be taken from my example; and may the sincerity with which I acknowledge my offence, and the tears which I have shed, efface it from the accumulated records of the wilfulness ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... interference of the will. It is only under some express excitement, that the faculty of will mounts its throne, and exercises its empire. When the child smiles, that act is involuntary; but, when he cries, will presently comes to mix itself with the phenomenon. Wilfulness, impatience and rebellion are infallible symptoms of a mind on the alert. And, as the child in the first stages of its existence puts forth the faculty of will only at intervals, so for a similar reason this period is but rarely accompanied with memory, or leaves any traces ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... respect she submitted, but whenever these differences occurred, he felt that in the end she was unconquered. Inconsistent as it may appear, though fretted for the time by her firmness, he loved her the more for her "wilfulness," as he termed it; and despotic and exacting though he certainly was in many respects, he stood somewhat in awe of his pure-hearted, calm-eyed child. His ward and nephew, Hugh Seymour, had resided with him ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... was in no danger of being captivated by Alfred. She distrusted and disliked him. Indeed, her perception was so quick, and her observation so sharp, that after all she mistrusted his wife too, though with her giddy vanity and wilfulness she squeezed the mistrust away into a corner of her mind, and blocked it ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... they can tell that knew him) was a man very well learned and grave, but somewhat sour and of no plausible utterance: the gentleman's chance was to say: 'My lord, the simple woman is not so much to blame as her leud abettors, who by violent persuasions have led her into this wilfulness.' Quoth the Judge; 'What need such eloquent terms in this place?' The gentleman replied, 'Doth your lordship mislike the term (violent)? and methinks I speak it to great purpose; for I am sure she would never have done it, but by force ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... West, at once startlingly and attractively true. * * * The heroine is a strange, sweet mixture of pride, wilfulness and lovable courage. The characters are superbly drawn; the atmosphere is convincing. There is about it a sweetness, a wholesomeness and a sturdiness that commends it to earnest, ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... full of remorse for her wilfulness, which had occasioned Harald's accident, so grateful for his care for her, that every bitter feeling as well towards him as to Alette, had vanished from her heart. She felt now only a deep, almost painful necessity ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... hardly to be avoided. Each considered the other the prey of the devil, but in secret each esteemed in the other a manly worth. Again and again they fell into dissension, even in writing, but again and again Luther prayed warmly for his neighbor's soul. The reckless wilfulness of Henry VIII. of England, on the other hand, offended the German reformer to the depths of his soul; he reviled him horribly and without cessation; and even in his last years he treated the hot-headed Henry of Brunswick like a naughty school-boy. "Clown" was the mildest ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... cannot two at least see things in their true light? Why was it that she remained so blind to the real state of affairs? Either ignorance or wilfulness kept her from the light, and coldly bidding him good night, ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... to sleep that night he made up his mind that it was his duty as a clergyman and a Christian to look over Phillis's wilfulness, and to befriend to the utmost of his power the strangers, widow and fatherless, that Providence had placed ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... among contemporary works, which are so largely personal expressions, but give them an eminent individuality as well. Like the Greek sculpture, they are plainly the production of culture, which in restraining wilfulness, however happily inspired, and imposing measure and poise, nevertheless acutely stimulates and develops the faculties themselves. The skeptic who may very plausibly inquire the distinction between that vague entity, "the ideal," and the personal ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... words following: 'Sir, remember yourself: I keep here the place of the King your sovereign lord and father, to whom ye owe double obedience; wherefore eftsoons in his name I charge you desist of your wilfulness and unlawful enterprise, and from henceforth give good example to those which hereafter shall be your proper subjects. And now, for your contempt and disobedience, go you to the prison of the King's Bench, whereunto I commit you; and remain ye there prisoner ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... influences, and all of them contagious—may decide by a shout what years of afterthought may find it hard, or even impossible, to undo. There have been some things in the deportment of the President of late that have suggested to thoughtful men rather the pettish foible of wilfulness than the strength of well-trained and conscientious will. It is by the objects for whose sake the force of volition is called into play that we decide whether it is childish or manly, whether we are to call it obstinacy or firmness. Our own judgment can draw no favorable augury from meetings ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... delighted in her. It was she who had inherited all her father's gayety and spirit. Jose had none of them, and, being slow and simple, had always found her a wonder and a strange pleasure. She had, indeed, been the one bright thing in his life, and even her wilfulness had a charm for him. He always gave way to it and was content. Had she not even once defied the uncle when no one else would have dared to do it? holding her little head up and confronting him in such a burst of pretty rage that the old curmudgeon had been quite quelled for once in his life, and ...
— The Pretty Sister Of Jose - 1889 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... unhappy. He fancied Zora cared less for his company, and he gave her less, and then was puzzled to find time hanging so empty, so wretchedly empty, on his hands. When they were together in these days they found less to talk about, and had it not been for the Silver Fleece which in magic wilfulness opened both their mouths, they would have found their companionship little more than a series of awkward silences. Yet in their silences, their walks, and their sittings there was a companionship, a glow, a satisfaction, as came to them ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... he thought the more. The reader must have perceived that Jack's notions of equality were rapidly disappearing; he defended them more from habit, and perhaps a wilfulness which would not allow him to acknowledge himself wrong; to which may be added his love of argument. Already he had accustomed himself to obedience to his superiors, and, notwithstanding his arguments, he would admit of no resistance from those below him; not that it ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... poor soul! I had a thousand times sooner hear you say that you cannot mend than that you can. For those who really feel they cannot mend—those who are really weary and worn out with the burden of their sins—those who are tired out with their own wilfulness, and feel ready to lie down and die, like a spent horse, and say, "God take me away, no matter to what place; I am not fit to live here on earth, a shame and a torment to myself day and night"—those who are in that state of mind are ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... Red Bull Tavern, played the part of King Edward's delicate minion. On Marlowe's death, he seems to have returned to Shakespeare, who, whatever his fellow-partners may have thought of the matter, was not slow to forgive the wilfulness and treachery ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... of her; he was piqued to the last degree by her frankness. He could not but acknowledge the truth of what she said, that she had been persuaded into the match when but a child; for she seemed a very infant now, in wilfulness and ignorance of the world. But I believe neither he nor her father had one compunctious misgiving as to their having profaned the holiness of marriage by such an union. Their minds had never been opened to the true meaning ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... arrival in Europe, he was entrusted with a command in Portugal, against the French then occupying that country. He was much embarrassed by his own government, and the wilfulness of the people to rescue whom was his mission. The convention of Cintra arrested his successes. The stupidity of his superiors defeated his schemes of conquest. "Yet, even as things stood, the success achieved was of no ordinary character. The British ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Fakan wept and said, "By Allah! I rebuked him not for his words, nor for ill-will to him, but because I feared for him the malice of foes. Indeed my passion for him is double that he feeleth for me; my tongue may not describe my yearning for him; and were it not for the extravagant wilfulness of his words and the wanderings of his wit, my father had not cut off from him favours that besit, nor had decreed unto him exclusion and prohibition as fit. However, man's days bring nought but change, and patience in all case is most becoming: peradventure He who ordained our severance ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... is not in my power," said Amelia, with the wilfulness of a spoiled child not accustomed to opposition. "I will not become a Lutheran. A Pollnitz may change his faith, but not the daughter of Frederick William. Did not the king with indignation and contempt relate to us how Pollnitz ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... accumulation of their woes, he might have regarded the scene as presenting but a reasonable retribution upon a stolid obstinacy in the most direful and needless self-inflictions. "Why could they not have been content to cling to the comforts of Old England, and to restrain their wilfulness of spirit?" The question is answered now differently from what it would have been then. We have used one wrong word about those exiles, in speaking of them as cowering under their woes. They did not cower, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... fretted secretly Mordaunt could not doubt, but she was so zealous to hide all traces of it from him that he never detected them. He only missed her gay wilfulness and the sunshine of her smile. She responded to his tenderness even more readily than usual, but she did not open her heart to him. There seemed to be a barrier intervening that she could not ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... is the child of truth, begotten by virtue and kindness; when Nature in the temper of the spirit made even the balance of indifference. His eye is clear from blindness and his hand from bribery, his will from wilfulness and his heart from wickedness; his word and deed are all one; his life shows the nature of his love, his care is the charge of his conscience, and his comfort the assurance of his salvation. In the seat ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... would first see what the earl intended doing—whether he would keep his force together or discharge his fleet. Sigurd Syr said, "It is for thee, king, to command; but," he adds, "I fear, from thy disposition and wilfulness, that thou wilt some day be betrayed by trusting to those great people, for they are accustomed of old to bid defiance to their sovereigns." There was no attack made, for it was soon seen that the earl's fleet was dispersing. ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... resolution, dismissed the partners of his riots and late hours, denied his house and person to their most earnest solicitings, and will be seen by none. He keeps ever alone, and his grief (which is solitary) does not so much seem to possess and govern in him, as it is by him, with a wilfulness of most manifest ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... table set over by the window, and his wife beating up the batter for the buckwheat pancakes that she was about to griddle for breakfast. Lidey, still in her little blue flannel nightgown, but with beaded deerskin moccasins on her tiny feet, and the golden wilfulness of her hair tied back demurely with a blue ribbon, was seated at one end of the table, her eager face half buried in a sheet of paper. She was laboriously inditing, for perhaps the twentieth time, ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... stream, and saw in the moonlight how it had taken its wild course directly in front of the haunted forest, so as to change the peninsula into an island. "Oh God!" he thought to himself, "if Undine has ventured a step into that fearful forest, perhaps in her charming wilfulness, just because I was not allowed to tell her about it; and now the stream may be rolling between us, and she may be weeping on the other side alone, among phantoms ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... with contempt. Thou art well-versed in the shastras, intelligent and endowed with wisdom. My inclination was never to war, not did I delight in the destruction of my race. I made no distinction between my own children and the children of Pandu. My own sons were prone to wilfulness and despised me because I am old. Blind as I am, because of my miserable plight and through paternal affection, I bore it all. I was foolish alter the thoughtless Duryodhana ever growing in folly. Having been a spectator ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... half the possibilities of mental pain, and also there was no finality about anything—all might develop into sunshine again. Now she had the most cruel torture of all, the knowledge that she herself by her wilfulness and pride had pulled down the blinds and brought herself into darkness, and that there was not ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... the usual way it takes up like the others three nitro groups and so becomes tri-nitro-toluol. Realizing that people could not be expected to use such a mouthful of a word, the chemists have suggested various pretty nicknames, trotyl, tritol, trinol, tolite and trilit, but the public, with the wilfulness it always shows in the matter of names, persists in calling it TNT, as though it were an author like G.B.S., or G.K.C, or F.P.A. TNT is the latest of these high explosives and in some ways the best of them. Picric acid has the bad habit of attacking ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... absolute power in human hands is always abused, the unfavorable meaning predominates. Autocratic power knows no limits outside the ruler's self; arbitrary power, none outside the ruler's will or judgment, arbitrary carrying the implication of wilfulness and capriciousness. Despotic is commonly applied to a masterful or severe use of power, which is expressed more decidedly by tyrannical. Arbitrary may be used in a good sense; as, the pronunciation ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... in her way equally charming, she was not of such a heavenly gravity as her little comrade. On the contrary, at this time her spirits overflowed in a bewitching and mischievous wilfulness, which made her the more irresistible. She was conscious that she was soon to be wedded, and this knowledge gave her a sense of importance together with mysterious heart throbbings and perturbations, a wild curiosity to ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... had, of course, the simple and hardy education proper to the natives of the mountainous island of his birth, and in his infancy was not remarkable for more than that animation of temper, and wilfulness and impatience of inactivity, by which children of quick parts and lively sensibility are usually distinguished. The winter of the year was generally passed by the family of his father at Ajaccio, where they still preserve and exhibit, as the ominous play-thing of Napoleon's boyhood, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... unattained, owing to the thickness of his skull. Surely no person in hell was ever more unhappy than O'olo, and it is with grief one tells of him, for he was like a child, who, on being refused a mango throws away his banana in wilfulness—and with him, his banana was right conduct, and the respect of others, and the laws of God, leaving him ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... both the concurrence and compromise, regulating all wilfulness of design: and, more curious still, the crystals do NOT always give way to each other. They show exactly the same varieties of temper that human creatures might. Sometimes they yield the required place with perfect grace and courtesy; forming fantastic, but exquisitely finished groups: ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... respectful and impartial consideration to the arguments of brethren, and especially of seniors. If a single mind remains unmoved, its dissent is decisive. But it would be the gravest dereliction of duty to persist from wilfulness, obstinacy, or pride, in adhesion to a view perhaps hastily expressed in opposition to authority and argument. The debate to which my speech gave rise lasted for two hours. Each speaker spoke but a few terse expressive sentences; and after each speech came a pause allowing ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... me unto your person: in Sir Launcelot and you I most had my joy, and mine affiance, and now have I lost my joy of you both; wherefore all mine earthly joy is gone from me. Mine uncle King Arthur, said Sir Gawaine, wit you well my death-day is come, and all is through mine own hastiness and wilfulness; for I am smitten upon the old wound the which Sir Launcelot gave me, on the which I feel well I must die; and had Sir Launcelot been with you as he was, this unhappy war had never begun; and of all this am I causer, for Sir Launcelot and his blood, through their prowess, held all ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... later, the old cordial relations were never restored. There were times when the Prince called on Beethoven and was not received, when the latter was not in the mood for seeing him. Through his wilfulness, Beethoven lost the annuity which the Prince had settled on him on his coming to Vienna. The initiative in this matter was probably taken by Beethoven himself, as may be inferred from a letter he writes to a friend two years later: "My circumstances ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... Deny it not, nay, do not shrink from me, and think, because I appear so calm, I cannot feel for those who are dear to me, and even sympathise in their love. I do not, I will not condemn the past; I did once, I own, but since I have known you, I have forgiven the mistaken wilfulness of a misguided girl. You love him—confess ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... evil demons. I had previously known (from Methley, I think, who had travelled in Persia) that this notion, so conducive to the safety of our countrymen, is generally prevalent amongst Orientals. It owes its origin, partly to the strong wilfulness of the English gentleman (which not being backed by any visible authority, either civil or military, seems perfectly superhuman to the soft Asiatic), but partly too to the magic of the banking system, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... if they perish it will be like unto the Jaredites, because of the wilfulness of their hearts, ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... him with unalloyed terror, which a perfect knowledge of his disposition, and of his preceding history, too well authorised her to entertain. Whatever was in other respects the nobleness of his disposition, he had never been known to resist the wilfulness of passion,—he walked in the house, and in the country of his fathers, like a tamed lion, whom no one dared to contradict, lest they should awaken his natural vehemence of passion. So many years had elapsed since he had experienced contradiction, or even expostulation, that probably nothing ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... them at any age, we ought to look upon him, in my estimation, as animated in some measure by his self-foreshadowing best. And whether it is dreams with which we have to do, or neurotic conflicts, or wilfulness, or regression, we shall learn to see, more and more, as we become accustomed to look for evidences thereof, the signs of this sort of promise, just as we might hope to learn to find, more and more, through the inspection of ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Monro's face, and moved her lips without a sound being heard, and fainted dead away. In all her life she had never done so before, and when she came round she was not like herself; in all probability the persistence and wilfulness she, who was usually so meek and docile, showed during the next twenty-four hours, was the consequence of fever. She resolved to be present at the wedding; numbers were going; she would be unseen, unnoticed in the crowd; but whatever befell, go she would, and neither ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... are savage; they are solitary; they are ready to hurt one another. They are like our individual impulses seeking the unlimited freedom of wilfulness. Left to themselves they are destructive. But directly an ideal of unity raises its banner in their centre, it brings these rebellious forces under its sway and creation is revealed—the creation which is peace, which is the unity of perfect relationship. Our greed for eating is ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... she went to the captain to intercede for him. The boy was liberated, but the comely intercessor was impressed into the service of the captain. From him she went to live with a man of wealth; but her extravagance and wilfulness induced him to forego her company. Then followed a period of the lowest street degradation. From this state she was taken by a Dr. Graham, who was a lecturer upon health, and exhibited the finely-formed Emma as a perfect specimen of female symmetry. She became the topic of ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... his body as a paradise To envelope and contain celestial spirits. Never was such a sudden scholar made; Never came reformation in a flood With such a heady currance, scouring faults; Nor never Hydra-headed wilfulness So soon did lose his seat, and all at once, As in ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]
... dispirited with toil, and wholly overcome by grief and dispair, I lay down between two ridges, and heartily wished I might there end my days. I bemoaned my desolate widow and fatherless children. I lamented my own folly and wilfulness, in attempting a second voyage, against the advice of all my friends and relations. In this terrible agitation of mind, I could not forbear thinking of Lilliput, whose inhabitants looked upon me as the greatest prodigy ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... without an object was so great that Rose was afraid to look a man in the face lest he should perceive in her eyes the feelings that filled her soul. By a wilfulness, which was perhaps only the continuation of her earlier methods, though she felt herself attracted toward the men who might still suit her, she was so afraid of being accused of folly that she treated them ungraciously. Most persons ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... that looked read it, well enough. Yet with a man's wilfulness, drawing Wych Hazel into his arms and bending his face to ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... and though he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that which was mixed with impurity he never could endure." A higher conception of duty coloured men's daily actions. To the Puritan the wilfulness of life, in which the men of the Renascence had revelled, seemed unworthy of life's character and end. His aim was to attain self-command, to be master of himself, of his thought and speech and acts. A certain gravity and reflectiveness gave its ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... the heavy responsibility of managing her in the hands of a husband. The stubborn violence of Sir George's nature, the rough side of which had never before been shown to Dorothy, in her became adroit wilfulness of a quality that no masculine mind may compass. But her life had been so entirely undisturbed by opposing influences that her father, firm in the belief that no one in his household would dare to thwart his will, had remained in dangerous ignorance of the latent trouble which pervaded ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... course I didn't say that aloud, but just thought it to myself. And really I do wonder sometimes that your excellent father, when he taught you Latin, should have permitted you to take such liberties with our good mother tongue. But after all it is only another sign of your right Southern wilfulness. Do you not take even greater liberties with poor ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... Brandon, quickly, but with an affectionate tone of wilfulness; "and now, as I feel very much fatigued with my journey, you must allow me ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "It was not wilfulness, but my great love," said the broken, gentle voice, "that made the condition. All of you I cannot extol, knowing what I have known. But you are an honest gentleman and a true, my brave; and you shall make this dearest a ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... the men, and so were quite unable to control Randall and other restless spirits. Randall, arguing that no one could see him, would pop up his head, others imitated, and so on the whole a fine example of discipline our platoon made. But David, lost in wonder at such wilfulness, never raised his head above ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... Oliver, the politician, again, with a double reference in his thoughts, it would almost seem, to an erring State or an absent child, "one may break away in wilfulness or crime—what then?" ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... herself first on my cousin's neck and then on mine and then on my uncle's; he indeed stood as though deeply offended, as likewise did my good godfather Christian. Yet they would not speak, that they might not mar our joy, albeit Uncle Pfinzing growled forth that our plan was sheer youthful folly, wilfulness, and the like. "At any rate it is an unlaid egg, so long as my wife has not added mustard to the peppered broth," Uncle Conrad declared, and he departed to carry tidings to my aunt of what mad folly these women's heads ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... mother had let herself get stout—which seemed a dangerous mark of confidence in the male animal. But the major was fifteen years older than his wife, and she had a weak heart with which to intimidate him. Now and then the wilfulness of Castleman Lysle would become unendurable in the house, and his father would seize him and turn him over his knee. His screams would bring "Miss Margaret" flying to the rescue: "Major Castleman, how dare you spank one of my children?" And she ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... now of wilfulness, of self-assertion! After the sullenness and revolt of the day before, which had lasted intermittently almost up to the coming of the doctors, nothing could be more speaking, more ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mellowed by gratitude, and regard, and esteem, it was perhaps even more delightful. He was loved, and he was loved by an exquisite being, who was the object of universal admiration. What could he desire more? Nothing but the wilfulness of youth could have induced him for a moment to contemplate breaking chains which had only been formed to secure his felicity. He determined to bid farewell for ever to the impetuosity of youth. He had not ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... self-righteous, children who would "sugar over" a very ugly personage ten hours out of the twelve every day, and then at night thank the Lord for all his mercies. In Lune-street Chapel faction used to run high and wilfulness was a gem which many of the members wore very near their hearts; but much of the old feudal spirit of party fighting has died out, and there are signs of pious resignation and loving kindness in the flock, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... no indication of dissatisfaction or resistance. In truth she was not sorry that Jacqueline, whose companionship became more and more embarrassing every day, had cut the knot of a difficult position by a piece of wilfulness and perversity which seemed to put her in the wrong. The necessity she would have been under of crushing such a girl, who was now eighteen, would have been distasteful and unprofitable; she was very glad ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... the end of this adventure brought about by her own audacious wilfulness. Some day she supposed Dick Garstin would be satisfied with his work. A successful portrait of Arabian would stand on the easel in Glebe Place. Garstin was not at all satisfied yet. She knew that. He had put aside two more beginnings angrily, had started ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... he said, suddenly seizing her hand, and drawing her to his side, "why will you not give up this strange wilfulness, and let your papa have his own darling again? I love you dearly, my child, and it pains me more than I can express to see you so unhappy," he added, gently pushing back the curls from the little tear-stained face upturned ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... not necessary.' This relapse into wilfulness was because he had again connected the epithet ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... waited purposely until February was dead. Cynics may say that this was only wisdom, in that a damnatory notice from me might have inspired that unhappy month to an unusually brilliant run, out of sheer wilfulness. I prefer to think that it was good manners which forbade me to be disrespectful to her very face. It is bad manners to speak the truth to the living, but February is dead. ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... his hand and his head was turned towards the girl, his brain busy with his thoughts of her and her wilfulness. From the tail of his eye he caught the first lunge of the bull, and that automatic mental adjustment to unexpected situations, which we call presence of mind, sent a knee-signal to Surry which that intelligent animal ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... these, guilty though they may have been, is not directed the moralist's unmeasured censure. His reproaches in such cases tend less to condemn than to awake to a sense of moral responsibility; earnestness in pointing out remedy and safeguards takes the place of severity against wilfulness. For he knows that not a few sentences of condemnation Christ writes on the sands, as He did in a celebrated case, and many an over-zealous accuser he has confounded, like the villainous Pharisees whom ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... of whom had been concerned with Wyatt and Carew. Here also came John Daniel, in the service at one time of Lord Northampton, who, not being in parliament, was excluded from the more private consultations, but heard much of the general talk; "how they, with great wilfulness, as might be perceived by their behaviour, did sore mislike such Catholic proceedings as they saw the queen went about, and did intend to resist such matters as should be spoken of in the Parliament ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... one to other of us with his old, whimsical look. "Praise God I do see again two souls, the most wilful and unruly in all this world, yet here stand ye that should be most thoroughly dead (what with the peril consequent upon wilfulness) but for a most especial Providence—there stand ye fuller of life and the joy o' living ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... tavern. The sport of Kingsley was my death. What he had said previously sunk deep into my soul. Not rightly—not as it should have sunk—showing me the folly of my own course without assuming, as I did, the inevitable wilfulness of the course of others; but actually confirming me in my fears—nay, making them grow hideous as THINGS and substantive convictions. It seemed to me, from what Kingsley said that I was already dishonored—that the world already ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... thing in the conduct of public affairs, where they have been managed with rashness or wilfulness, corruption, ignorance or injustice; barely to relate the facts, at least, while they are fresh in memory, will as much reflect upon the persons concerned, as if we had ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... might be accepted. Now it was no longer a slight thing to him. I do not know that it was love that made him so eager; not good, honest, downright love. But he had set his heart upon the object, and with the wilfulness of a Dale was determined that it should be his. He had no remotest idea of giving up his cousin, but he had at last persuaded himself that she was not to be won without some toil, and ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... and those who knew Gilbert best believed him incapable of posing. But he was perfectly capable of wilfulness and of sulking like a schoolboy. It amused him to argue with Mr. Noel, it did not amuse him at all to take the chair at a meeting. So, as he was not allowed to go on arguing, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... aspect of what we call "the soul" wherever the soul exists, feels no sort of shock or surprise when we appeal to its own "conscience," or when it appeals to the "conscience" of its child or its dog or even of its cat, or when it displays anger with its trees or its flowers for their apparent wilfulness and errancy. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... interpretation of "A Narrow Vessel," has left us in prose a description of human weakness and wilfulness reluctant of its true bliss. The following passage is an excellent commentary on the "Hound of Heaven." "Though God," he says, "asks of the soul but to love Him what it may, and is ready to give an increased love for a poor little, the soul feels that this ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... had been Christmas Eve. When she had announced her choice of a day, they had chidden her. But with girlish wilfulness she had clung to it ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... of Law makes it certain that no amount of past opposition to it, whether from ignorance or wilfulness, will prevent it from working in accordance with its own beneficent and life-giving character as soon as we quit our inverted position and place ourselves in our true relation towards it. The laws of Nature do not harbour revenge; and once we adapt our methods to their character, they ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... characteristic, that he was totally unlike Sir Isaac. And the play was false she felt in giving this speech to a broken woman. Such things are not said by broken women. Broken women do no more than cheat and lie. But so a woman might speak out of her unconquered wilfulness, as a queen might give her lover a kingdom out of the fullness ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... next line: "Where earth doth end with endless ending." David, regarding the world as a flat disc, speaks of the ends of the earth: Sidney, knowing it to be a globe, uses the word of the Psalmist, but re-moulds and changes the form of it, with a power fantastic, almost capricious in its wilfulness, yet causing it to express the fact with a marvel of precision. We see that the earth ends; we cannot reach the end we see; therefore the "earth doth end with endless ending." It is a case of that contradiction in the form of the words used, which brings out a truth in another ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... many more ideas than we could possibly use that the labour of deciding among them was the next thing to be done. Each of us stood out boldly for her own project,—even Francesca clinging, from sheer wilfulness, to her worthless and absurd itineraries,—until, in order to bring the matter to any sort of decision, somebody suggested that we consult Benella; which reminds me that you have not yet the pleasure of ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... well-versed in the shastras, intelligent and endowed with wisdom. My inclination was never to war, not did I delight in the destruction of my race. I made no distinction between my own children and the children of Pandu. My own sons were prone to wilfulness and despised me because I am old. Blind as I am, because of my miserable plight and through paternal affection, I bore it all. I was foolish alter the thoughtless Duryodhana ever growing in folly. Having been a spectator of the riches ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Tom Tusher never permitted his mind to stray out of the prescribed University path, accepted the Thirty-nine Articles with all his heart, and would have signed and sworn to other nine-and-thirty with entire obedience. Harry's wilfulness in this matter, and disorderly thoughts and conversation, so shocked and afflicted his senior, that there grew up a coldness and estrangement between them, so that they became scarce more than mere acquaintances, from having been intimate friends when they came to college first. Politics ran ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... Jackson chose unfrequented roads, therefore narrow, therefore worse than other roads, to the end that his policy of utter secrecy might be the better served; but to the majority his course seemed sprung from a certain cold wilfulness, a harshness without object, unless his object were to wear out flesh and bone. The road, such as it was, was sheeted with ice. The wind blew steadily from the northwest, striking the face like a whip, and the fine rain and snow continued to fall and to freeze as it fell. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... be avoided. Each considered the other the prey of the devil, but in secret each esteemed in the other a manly worth. Again and again they fell into dissension, even in writing, but again and again Luther prayed warmly for his neighbor's soul. The reckless wilfulness of Henry VIII. of England, on the other hand, offended the German reformer to the depths of his soul; he reviled him horribly and without cessation; and even in his last years he treated the hot-headed Henry of Brunswick like a naughty school-boy. "Clown" ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... window, he paced the floor with anguish keen as though she had gone from him for ever. What obstinacy, what unreasoning wilfulness—and what would come of it? He spent the long night brooding over his great sorrow, the root of which was the fear that his dear wife did not belong to Christ, for beloved her through all her unloveliness. "Husbands, love your wives even as Christ loved the church." His love had something in ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... thing as a girl could well do. And yet Polly had originally no actual intention or desire to do wrong. Simply she had yielded to a sudden impulse, to an intense curiosity. But now things were different; for Polly was realizing her wilfulness completely, and instead of repenting and turning back to confess her folly, was every moment trying to plan by what method her purpose could ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... in secret to Rachel and Vidas, and tell them to come hither privately; for I cannot take my treasures with me because of their weight, and will pledge them in their hands. Let them come for the chests at night, that no man may see them. God knows that I do this thing more of necessity than of wilfulness; but by God's good help I shall redeem all. Now Rachel and Vidas were rich Jews, from whom the Cid used to receive money for his spoils. And Martin Antolinez went in quest of them, and he passed through Burgos and entered into the Castle; and when he saw them he said, Ah Rachel ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... Pride, and not attempted, at his bidding, things that I was not able to perform—if he had not introduced me to Folly, whom I encouraged, although I despised her—the explosion would never have taken place, I should have suffered no shame and loss. I am willing to bear the consequences of my own wilfulness and presumption. I should blush to wear the crown of Success, which I feel that I do not merit. Let me see it on your brow, dear Nelly; its proper place is there. Next to the pleasure of winning it myself, is that of knowing that it belongs to one ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... truth did not himself comprehend it much more clearly. Some strange freak of wilfulness impelled him to pursue this unintelligible persecution. "I've said nothing about any offense," he declared, in a hard, deliberate voice. "It is your own word. All the same—I mention the name of a lady—a lady, mind you, whom I met under your own roof—and you strike attitudes ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... therefore determined to marry her to some eligible gentleman as quickly as possible, and to place the heavy responsibility of managing her in the hands of a husband. The stubborn violence of Sir George's nature, the rough side of which had never before been shown to Dorothy, in her became adroit wilfulness of a quality that no masculine mind may compass. But her life had been so entirely undisturbed by opposing influences that her father, firm in the belief that no one in his household would dare to thwart his will, ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... needs no help in playing her part in the world; but no amount of self-confidence, no ability to fight, if once the fight be on, will serve to protect her from having quarrels thrust upon her—not necessarily in wilfulness by any individual antagonist but by mere force of circumstance. Considered from the standpoint of her own expediency, an alliance with Great Britain would give to the United States an absolute guarantee that for as many years as she pleased she would be free to devote all ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... had not understood. This attack of his on the established had seemed to her just so much wilfulness of opinion. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... work," observed Anne. "One feels as though one could forgive her all her sins after the success she made of her booth. It is a shame that so much ability and cleverness is choked and crowded out by wilfulness and temper." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... then he moves tongue and lips in a marvelous fashion, and often says ptoe-ptoe, pt-pt, and verlapp, also dla-dla, without meaning, no matter what was the form of the word pronounced to him. In such practice there often appears likewise a wilfulness, showing itself in inarticulate sounds and the shaking of the head, even when it is merely the repetition of easy like-syllabled words that is desired. Hence, in the case of new words, it is more difficult than before, or is even impossible to determine whether the child ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... with hesitation, almost with fear, that I began with Gwen; but even had I been able to foresee the endless series of exasperations through which she was destined to conduct me, still would I have undertaken my task. For the child, with all her wilfulness, her tempers and her pride, made me, as she did all others, her ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... confusion. 'I—I—did not know you were here, sir!' she began. 'I was out for a little walk.' She could get no further; her eyes filled with tears. That spice of wilfulness, even hardness, which characterized her in Jim's company, magically disappeared in ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... ship in the hollows of the sea. The very margins of waste ground, as they trench a little farther on the beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of the hedge, have something of the same free delicacy of line—of the same swing and wilfulness. You might think for a whole summer's day (and not have thought it any nearer an end by evening) what concourse and succession of circumstances has produced the least of these deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in this that we should look for the secret of their ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... opportunities, stirring his mind to a busy consideration of chances. Thus then it seemed as though Blent might fall into the background, his loved Blent. Perhaps his not thinking of it had begun in wilfulness, or even in fear; but he found the rule he had made far easier to keep than he had ever expected. There had been a sort of release for his mind; he had not foreseen this as a possible result of his great sacrifice. He even felt rather richer; which seemed a strange paradox, till he reflected ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... with his preparations; taking very slight notice of the raillery of the young officers, answering Mrs. Evelyn with polite words, and silencing his mother as he came up with one of those looks out of his dark eyes to which she always forgave the wilfulness for the sake of the beauty and the winning power. She was completely conquered, and stepped back with ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... great-uncle, he succeeded to the peerage as Lord Byron, but for many years he continued to be heavily in debt, partly because of lavish extravagance, which was one expression of his inherited reckless wilfulness. Throughout his life he was obliged to make the most heroic efforts to keep in check another inherited tendency, to corpulence; he generally restricted his diet almost entirely to such meager fare as potatoes and soda-water, though he often broke out also into ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... seems to have desired to do justice, but whose personal dislike to the young Chevalier over-masters his inclination to the cause. Notwithstanding a plain disapproval of many measures, and a marked conviction of the wilfulness of his young leader, Lord Elcho was true to the cause which he had adopted. His account of the manner in which the council of the Regent, as he was styled, was conducted, is so characteristic, not only of those to whom he ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... learns first of all to see God in everything, and still to say, 'Thy will be done.' He knows that a child of God cannot possibly be in any situation without the will of His Heavenly Father, even when that will has been to leave him to his own wilfulness for a time, or to suffer the consequences of his own or others' sin. He sees this, and in accepting his circumstances as the will of God to try and prove him, he is in the right position for now knowing and doing what is right. Seeing and honouring God's will thus in ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... tri-nitro-toluol. Realizing that people could not be expected to use such a mouthful of a word, the chemists have suggested various pretty nicknames, trotyl, tritol, trinol, tolite and trilit, but the public, with the wilfulness it always shows in the matter of names, persists in calling it TNT, as though it were an author like G.B.S., or G.K.C, or F.P.A. TNT is the latest of these high explosives and in some ways the best of them. Picric acid has the bad habit of attacking the metals with which ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... the talk more furious. Lord Glaramara insisted, with the wilfulness of the man who can do as he pleases, that Constance Bledlow—whoever else came and ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... first, While Christ for long-cursed man was counted cursed; Christ, God and Man, Whom God the Father strook And shamed and sifted and one while forsook:— Cry shame upon our bodies we have nursed In sweets, our souls in pride, our spirits immersed In wilfulness, our steps run all acrook. Cry shame upon us! for He bore our shame In agony, and we look on at ease With neither hearts on flame nor cheeks on flame: What hast thou, what have I, to do with peace? Not to send peace but send a ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... and wilfulness in it too,' said she; 'and look what a rebuke Heaven gives me! it is not I that rescue Andrew; it ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... of a complete knowledge of the peculiarities of the Messianic age in the lapse of the ages since; by the almost universal change in our associations, modes of feeling and thought, and styles of speech; and by the gradual accretion and hardening of false doctrines and sectarian biases and wilfulness. As we examine the words of Christ to find their real meaning, there are four prominent considerations to be especially weighed and borne ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Prioress, with folded hands, "give me patience in dealing with wilfulness; grant me wisdom to cope with unreason; may it be given me to share the pain of this heart in torment, even as—when thou didst witness the sufferings of thy dear Son, our Lord, on Calvary—a sword pierced ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... necessary.' This relapse into wilfulness was because he had again connected the epithet foolish ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... this interview the test of her regard for Leonard. She had failed, and so had her test; her influence had not succeeded, but it had not snapped; the boy, in all his wilfulness, had been too much for her, and she could no longer condemn ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... discover that the quiet, sallow-faced, gentle-mannered little girl, whom she had first known at the convent school, was developing a character which might some day astonish every one who should attempt to oppose her. It had been a growth of strength, with an accentuation of wilfulness, and it had not been at all apparent ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... no sort of shock or surprise when we appeal to its own "conscience," or when it appeals to the "conscience" of its child or its dog or even of its cat, or when it displays anger with its trees or its flowers for their apparent wilfulness and errancy. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... crime, but for fighting the battles of their country. Some were cursing and execrating their oppressors; others, late at night, were relating their adventures to a new prisoner; others lamenting their aberrations from rectitude, and disobedience of parents, and head strong wilfulness, that drove them to sea, contrary to their parents' wish, while others of the younger class, were sobbing out their lamentations at the thoughts of what their mothers and sisters suffered, after knowing of their imprisonment. Not unfrequently the whole night was spent in this ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... and proved yourself of a character the very reverse of what I had supposed. For I had, Fanny, as I think my behaviour must have shewn, formed a very favourable opinion of you from the period of my return to England. I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence. But you have now shewn me that you can be ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... appetites into passions, and lends impetus to daring ambition, if it does not always purify the motives which prompt its exercise. This genius divorced from wisdom, scornful of moral obligations, and ravenous for notoriety, is especially marked by wilfulness, presumptuous self-assertion, the curse and plague-spot of the perverted soul. Alcibiades in politics and Byron in literature are among its most conspicuous examples. Their defiance of rule was not the confident daring which comes from the vision of genius, but the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... nations.[42] Life itself is with thee there, for thou art life; and all kinds of health, wrought upon us here by thine instruments, descend from thence. Thou wouldst have healed Babylon, but she is not healed.[43] Take from me, O Lord, her perverseness, her wilfulness, her refractoriness, and hear thy Spirit saying in my soul: Heal me, O Lord, for I would be healed. Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah his wound; then went Ephraim to the Assyrian, and sent to King Jareb, yet could not he heal you, nor cure you of your wound.[44] ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... honourably fulfils this solemn obligation of which I have told you—and he must be honourable, dear Mrs Varden, or he is no son of mine—a fortune within his reach. He is of most expensive, ruinously expensive habits; and if, in a moment of caprice and wilfulness, he were to marry this young lady, and so deprive himself of the means of gratifying the tastes to which he has been so long accustomed, he would—my dear madam, he would break the gentle creature's heart. Mrs Varden, my good lady, my dear soul, I put it to you—is such a sacrifice ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... The world is plenty good enough for them—a little too good for some I could name. The Mussulman is quite right in excluding them from heaven. What should we want of them when we get there? Won't there be plenty of houris there, with all their beauty and virtue, but without their extravagance and wilfulness? To say the least, they are the weaker vessels, though they carry the most sail. Am I, then, to drop my lip and hang my head and put my finger in my eye, because one of them, for some cause or no cause, chooses to turn up her nose at me? The proposition is absurd.—Thus, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... embodying an essential falsity, which equally affronts the common sense and the moral sense of mankind, and which, as respects chronology, was as repugnant to the instincts of Homer as it is to the instincts of Whittier, must have sprung from the unblessed union of wilfulness and avarice, of avarice which knows no conscience, and of wilfulness that tramples on reason; and the marks of this parentage, the signs of these its boasted roots in human nature, are, we are constrained to concede, visible in every stage of its growth, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... inaccessible distance, and chained in icy fetters on untrodden mountain-peaks, where the vulture ever devours his fair heart, which sympathises continually with the follies and the sorrows of mankind? Of what punishment, then, must not those be worthy, who by their own wilfulness and self-confidence bind again to Caucasus the fair ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... restless, unhappy. He fancied Zora cared less for his company, and he gave her less, and then was puzzled to find time hanging so empty, so wretchedly empty, on his hands. When they were together in these days they found less to talk about, and had it not been for the Silver Fleece which in magic wilfulness opened both their mouths, they would have found their companionship little more than a series of awkward silences. Yet in their silences, their walks, and their sittings there was a companionship, a glow, a satisfaction, as came to them ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... died away, and he was left intolerably alone under the solid impenetrable shroud that enveloped him, and the senseless form he held on his breast. And if he tried to follow on by that clue which Armine had left him, whirlwinds of dismay seemed to sweep away all hope and trust, while he thought of wilfulness, recklessness, defiance, irreverence, and all the yet darker shades of a self- indulgent and audacious ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was so full of remorse for her wilfulness, which had occasioned Harald's accident, so grateful for his care for her, that every bitter feeling as well towards him as to Alette, had vanished from her heart. She felt now only a deep, almost painful necessity of showing her devotion to them; and to give them some ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... just another of my headstrong boys," grumbled Lady Augusta. "They are all specimens of wilfulness. I never knew that it was this morning he intended to be off, until he was gone, and I had to run after him to the ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... incense, the intoned familiar words, animated her. Sommers had often wondered at the powerful influence this service exerted over her. To the training received here as a child was due, perhaps, that blind wilfulness of self-sacrifice which had first brought her ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... only by your own hearts, or by solitary instances; and you forget the inevitable downward course of wrong tendencies. Besides, she has neither lofty principle nor a strong will. You will think I mistake here; but I don't mean she has not wilfulness enough. A strong will generally excludes wilfulness,—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... chaffs by the camp fires. The soul that suffers more than other souls is little regarded here. The tragedy of the sensitive soul, always acute, becomes terrible when that soul is made king here by one of the accidents of life. As a king, Richard neglects his duties with that kind of wilfulness which the world never fails to punish. The wilfulness takes the form of a shutting of the eyes to all that is truly kingly. He rebukes devotion to duty by banishing Bolingbroke, who tries to rid him of a traitor. He rebukes old age and wisdom in ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... cities. The impossibility of securing even the simplest cooeperation from such patients is scarcely realized by any one who is not called upon to deal with them face to face. Even with an interpreter, they display the wilfulness of irresponsibility. One Italian woman wiped her chancre, which was on her lip, with her fingers at every other shake of the head. She was cooking for two boarders and had two children. She did not like ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... or like fowls in a hen-coop, for no crime, but for fighting the battles of their country; others, late at night, were relating their adventures to a new prisoner; others, lamenting their aberrations from rectitude, and disobedience to parents, and headstrong wilfulness, that drove them to sea, contrary to their parents' wish; while others, of the younger class, were sobbing out their lamentations at the thoughts of what their mothers and sisters suffered after knowing of their imprisonment. Not unfrequently the whole night was spent in this ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... always makes Choice of his Man, which is one that has the greatest Mouth, whom he brings to the Market with a Bowl to put it in. The Seller looks narrowly to the Man's Mouth that measures it, and if he happens to swallow any down, either through Wilfulness or otherwise, the Merchant or some of his Party, does not scruple to knock the Fellow down, exclaiming against him for false Measure. Thereupon, the Buyer finds another Mouthpiece to measure the Rum by; so that this Trading is very agreeable ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... took a turn at cooking in the middle of the day; she helped to detain Master Ward at the tea-table, and to keep his wig and knee-buckles from too early an appearance and too thorough a soaking of his self-conceit and wilfulness at his tavern; and she heard the lads their lessons, while she darned their ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... discussion of it. But here, in the brooding quiet of this bedchamber, and in Lady Calmady's presence, all that was changed. Trenchant statements of opinion, words of blame, were proscribed. The sinner, if spoken of at all, must be spoken of with due reticence and respect, his wilfulness ignored, the unloveliness of his conduct gently, even eagerly, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... almost precisely the same time, discourses at some length on the then prevailing epidemic of whimsicality, showing that shallowness beheld in the then existing interest in humor a justification for all sorts of eccentric behavior and inconsistent wilfulness. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... caused a diversion by sending Mrs. Church indoors for a pack of cards, and solemnly celebrated the occasion with a game of whist, at which Mrs. Church, in partnership with Mrs. Banks, either through sheer wilfulness or absence of mind, contrived to ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... heard the circumstantial truth, By good presumptions, touching this foul deed. Therefore, go on, young Bruce; proceed, refel[369] The allegation that puts in this doubt, Whether thy mother, through her wilfulness, Famish'd herself and her ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... when they covered church-roofs and canvases with sprawling figures in distorted attitudes. Instead of studying nature, they studied Michael Angelo's cartoons, exaggerating by their unintelligent discipleship his wilfulness and ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Atlantic Monthly, and I had allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began to write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. If you wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... are brought before an inquisition on a charge of wilfulness, you will be unable to defend yourself ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... sobered by the catastrophe, which he felt had been occasioned by his own wilfulness, ran aft to the taffrail; and when he saw the poor sailor struggling in the waves, impelled by his really fine nature, he darted overboard to save him; but he was not by any means a powerful swimmer, and, encumbered with his ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... do to be rude to a neighboring squire and a good customer; and Rose was the rich man's daughter and they poor cousins, so it would not do either to quarrel with her; and besides, the pretty maid, half by wilfulness, and half by her sweet winning tricks, generally contrived to get her own way wheresoever she went; and she herself had been wise enough to beg her aunt never to leave them alone,—for she "could not a-bear ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the words stung him. "You make a jest of it!" he said. "Heaven send we do not sorrow for your wilfulness. For my part, I've small hope of that same." He opened the door, and, turning his back upon his companion, went heavily, and without any attempt at concealment, past the pantry and up the stairs to his room. Colonel John heard him slip the bolt, and, bearing a heavy heart ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... an interpretation of "A Narrow Vessel," has left us in prose a description of human weakness and wilfulness reluctant of its true bliss. The following passage is an excellent commentary on the "Hound of Heaven." "Though God," he says, "asks of the soul but to love Him what it may, and is ready to give an increased love for a poor little, the soul feels that this ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... of what is saddest in human discords, is also the motive of what has come to be the only satisfying harmony in dramatic art. It takes the place, in our modern world, of the Necessity of the Greeks; and is not less impressive because it arises from the impulse and unreasoning wilfulness of man rather than from the implacable insistency of God. It is with perfect justice, both moral and artistic, that the fatal crisis, though mediately the result of accident, of error, is shown to be the consequence and the punishment of wrong. A tragedy resulting from the mistakes of the wholly ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... have suited Louise better than this change of arena for the exercise of her wilfulness and witchery. Before she had been many days in the French capital she was able to twist her aunt round her little finger—indeed her power of captivating was, to the end of her life, her chief dower—and ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... apparently would not work and he did not dare murder her outright, much as he would have liked to. It was maddening to think how one not very violent blow with a club or a knife would put an end to her wilfulness forever, and yet that the risk to himself in that case would be almost as deadly as the certainty for her. But accidents might happen. In a land of elephants, tigers, snakes, wild boars and desperate men there is a wide range for circumstance, and the sooner the accident ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... the poor and the rich. Hence the disposition, which we are not ashamed to confess we have, to guard jealously the rights of the poor and friendless and despised, and to be astute as far as we properly may, against injustice, whether proceeding from wilfulness or indifference." ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... these words following: 'Sir, remember yourself: I keep here the place of the King your sovereign lord and father, to whom ye owe double obedience; wherefore eftsoons in his name I charge you desist of your wilfulness and unlawful enterprise, and from henceforth give good example to those which hereafter shall be your proper subjects. And now, for your contempt and disobedience, go you to the prison of the King's Bench, whereunto I commit you; and ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... the young heiress into the gallery, for, with her childish wilfulness, she had preferred to go alone, and single out the Carset ladies by their resemblance to ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... not in my power," said Amelia, with the wilfulness of a spoiled child not accustomed to opposition. "I will not become a Lutheran. A Pollnitz may change his faith, but not the daughter of Frederick William. Did not the king with indignation and contempt relate to us how Pollnitz had again changed his religion ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... answered, with a feeble voice, "My lord and king, I know well my death is come, and through my own wilfulness, for I am smitten in the wound Sir Lancelot gave me. Alas! that I have been the cause of all this war, for but for me thou hadst been now at peace with Lancelot, and then had Modred never done this treason. I ...
— The Legends Of King Arthur And His Knights • James Knowles
... and an anecdote is related of him, that, after driving it awhile, he went to Mr. Clements, the builder at Norwich, and said, "Well, Clements, you have built a machine to surprise all the world, and I am come to surprise you by paying you for it." And to show his early quick perception, ready reply, wilfulness, and precocity, I must here relate two well-attested anecdotes: the first, when quite a child, and at his lessons in the nursery, on his mother's running up to dispel the noise and disturbance he was making, she exclaimed in anger, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... understand what style is, or they would see the merits of our young one," he said to Mrs. Pendennis. "I call him ours, ma'am, for I bred him; and I am as proud of him as you are; and, bating a little wilfulness, and a little selfishness, and a little dandification, I don't know a more honest, or loyal, or gentle creature. His pen is wicked sometimes, but he is as kind as a young lady—as Miss Laura here—and I believe he would not do any living ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to me," replied her mother. "I will manage him into it. Never tell a man anything, my dove, if thou wouldst have him do it. Men are such obstinate, perverse creatures, that as often as not they will just go the other way out of sheer wilfulness. Thou must always contrive ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... it, well enough. Yet with a man's wilfulness, drawing Wych Hazel into his arms and bending his face ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... is true of nations is true of individuals, of each separate human brother of the Son of man. Is there one young life ruined by its own folly—one young heart broken by its own wilfulness—or one older life fast losing the finer instincts, the nobler aims of youth, in the restlessness of covetousness, of fashion, of ambition? Is there one such poor soul over whom Christ does not grieve? One to whom, at some supreme crisis of their lives, He does ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... before the imperturbable march of the universe. "There will never be Justice for the People," he thought bitterly. "I was a dreamer. Heine was right. A mad world, my masters." But sometimes he had a gleam of suspicion that it was he that had lacked sanity. His Will had become mere wilfulness. In his love as in his crusade he had shut his eyes to the brute facts; had precipitated what could only be coaxed. "I die by my own hand," he said. If he had only married Rosalie Zander, who still lived on, loving him! These Russian and Bavarian minxes were neurotic, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... unfledged—a tall, slim, overgrown girl of sixteen, and somewhat spoiled. This was indeed only natural, for her immediate world of father, aunt, and relations had circled ever since her birth in the orbit of her charming wilfulness. Champney acknowledged to himself that he had done her bidding a little too frequently ever since the first yachting trip, when as a little girl she attached herself to him, or rather him to her as a part of her special goods and chattels. At that time their common ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... baroness, in a subdued voice; for, in spite of her will and wilfulness, this square-faced boy of mine was more than a match for her. "Very well, you will believe me another day, and now I will ask you to ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... Georgiana Podsnap there was this one difference, among many others, that Bella was in no danger of being captivated by Alfred. She distrusted and disliked him. Indeed, her perception was so quick, and her observation so sharp, that after all she mistrusted his wife too, though with her giddy vanity and wilfulness she squeezed the mistrust away into a corner of her mind, and blocked it ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Since, then, pride and wilfulness possessed them, they took to marauding, surrounded by the sons of the lords of the men of Erin. Thrice fifty men had they as pupils when they (the pupils) were were-wolfing in the province of Connaught, ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... my Father,' said Venetia, 'I have no other father but thee, O God! Forgive me, then, my heavenly parent, if in my wilfulness, if in my thoughtless and sinful blindness, I have sighed for a father on earth, as well as in heaven! Great have thy mercies been to me, O God! in a mother's love. Turn, then, again to me the heart of that mother whom I have offended! Let ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... indeed deep rooted. Whatever heart she had not frivoled away in wilfulness had been caught and won by Forsythe, the first grown man who had ever dared to make real love to her. Her jealousy of Margaret was the most intense thing that had ever come into her life. To think of him looking at Margaret, talking to Margaret, smiling at Margaret, walking or riding ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... she was never one of those who cannot be convinced that some particular course is not the wisest and most just to adopt without at once rushing to the conclusion that the leader who makes any mistakes must be in the wrong because of wilfulness or mere incapacity, and is therefore not worthy any ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... and moved her lips without a sound being heard, and fainted dead away. In all her life she had never done so before, and when she came round she was not like herself; in all probability the persistence and wilfulness she, who was usually so meek and docile, showed during the next twenty-four hours, was the consequence of fever. She resolved to be present at the wedding; numbers were going; she would be unseen, unnoticed in the crowd; but whatever befell, go she would, and neither the tears nor the prayers ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... no reply, but he thought the more. The reader must have perceived that Jack's notions of equality were rapidly disappearing; he defended them more from habit, and perhaps a wilfulness which would not allow him to acknowledge himself wrong; to which may be added his love of argument. Already he had accustomed himself to obedience to his superiors, and, notwithstanding his arguments, he would admit of no resistance from those below him; not that it was hardly ever attempted, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to dread the resentment of her son, whom her heart told her she had wronged. Of late, she had observed that his temper was less docile, and his determinations, especially upon this late occasion of his enlistment, independently formed, and then boldly carried through. She remembered the stern wilfulness of his father when he accounted himself ill-used, and began to dread that Hamish, upon finding the deceit she had put upon him, might resent it even to the extent of cutting her off, and pursuing his own course ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... regarded him with unalloyed terror, which a perfect knowledge of his disposition, and of his preceding history, too well authorised her to entertain. Whatever was in other respects the nobleness of his disposition, he had never been known to resist the wilfulness of passion,—he walked in the house, and in the country of his fathers, like a tamed lion, whom no one dared to contradict, lest they should awaken his natural vehemence of passion. So many years had elapsed since he ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... encouraged her to continue. The history that he gleaned from Cindy's disordered monologue was an old one, of illusion, wilfulness, disaster, cruelty and pride. Standing out from the blurred panorama of her gabble were little clear pictures—an ideal home in the far South; a quickly repented marriage; an unhappy season, full of wrongs and abuse, and, of late, an inheritance of money that ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... dear Roger, Louise Guerin the grisette has vanished; but Louise Guerin, a charming and fascinating creature whom any one would be proud to love, has taken her place. You know that with all my oddities, my wilfulness, my Huronisms as you call them, the slightest equivocal word, the least approach to a bold jest, uttered by feminine lips shocks me. Louise has never, in the many conversations that I have had with her, alarmed my captious modesty; and often ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... premature Spring, followed by an interval of doubtful weather. Sidney is the very Spring—the later May. And in prose he is the authentic, only Spring. It is a prose full of young joy, and young power, and young inexperience, and young melancholy, which is the wilfulness of ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... title of a novel by Smollett (1751). Peregrine Pickle is a savage, ungrateful spendthrift, fond of practical jokes, and suffering with evil temper the misfortunes brought on himself by his own wilfulness. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... But Monica, either through wilfulness or ignorance of his near locality, or perhaps fear of Miss Priscilla, refuses to meet his longing eyes. For my part, ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... material or political interference, but checked only by spiritual and moral influences, gradually attain to truth, appropriating goodness, and rejecting evil. Thought seems to run on unrestrained, stimulated by human caprice, sometimes by sinful wilfulness; yet it is seen really to be restrained by limits that are not of its own creation. In the world of conscious mind, as in unconscious matter, God hath set a law that shall not be broken. Reason, which creates the doubts, also allays them. It rebukes ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... deafness and ugliness have induced her to cultivate to the utmost degree her intellectual faculties, and several of her books are illustrations of a mind even masculine in its power and activity; but the constitutional feebleness, waywardness, and wilfulness of woman is nevertheless not unfrequently evinced by her, and as she grows older the infirmities of her nature are more and more conspicuous; vexed with neglect, without the kindly influences of home or friendship, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... by the lintel, in the daintiest of aprons, the daintiest of caps upon her golden hair; and every objection she swept aside with the wind of her merry wilfulness. No one ever had their way with ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... stubborn wilfulness and unfeeling carelessness of consequences that characterized his temper, he plunged into all manner of vicious indulgences; but what seemed to attract him the most irresistibly, and fix him the most firmly, was a fondness for gambling. The ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... destruction of the papers, it was a point on which he (Father Cristoforo) hardly dared, he said, with a shrug of his shoulders, to touch. The base ingratitude, the unfaithfulness to the interests of the Church, the presumption, the pride, the wilfulness, manifested in that action, transcended all his powers of reprobation. The matter must be referred to a higher authority than his. And so forth. And every word he said was like a ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... they were wont to pass over to Epidauros to have their disputes with one another settled by law: 71 but after this time they built for themselves ships and made revolt from the Epidaurians, moved thereto by wilfulness. So as they were at variance with them, they continued to inflict damage on them, since in fact they had command of the sea, and especially they stole away from them these images of Damia and Auxesia, and they ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... verge that religion and reason demanded. Jeanie had sense enough to see that a sudden and severe curb upon her sister's hitherto unrestrained freedom might be rather productive of harm than good, and that Effie, in the headstrong wilfulness of youth, was likely to make what might be overstrained in her father's precepts an excuse to herself for neglecting them altogether. In the higher classes, a damsel, however giddy, is still under the dominion of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... it, though. Wilfulness doesn't become either of us, Frances. I've tried my turn at it tonight, and it has ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... and as I knelt beside the coffin, where the pale hands that lay cross-folded on the breast, the motionless features, and the dreadful stillness of the whole figure, spoke eloquently of the change that had taken place, I thought of my many acts of wilfulness, ingratitude, and unkindness, which had often pained the loving heart that had now forever ceased to beat. Could I but see those still features again animated with life, I felt that never again would my tongue ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... brink of the swollen stream, and saw in the moonlight how it had taken its wild course directly in front of the haunted forest, so as to change the peninsula into an island. "Oh God!" he thought to himself, "if Undine has ventured a step into that fearful forest, perhaps in her charming wilfulness, just because I was not allowed to tell her about it; and now the stream may be rolling between us, and she may be weeping on the other side alone, among ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... harshly treated because others regard the victim of defective inhibition as having gone deliberately to work, through wicked perversity and pure wilfulness, to make himself a nuisance, to persist in being a nuisance, and to refuse to be other than a nuisance, rather than exercise what more fortunate men are ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... father's gayety and spirit. Jose had none of them, and, being slow and simple, had always found her a wonder and a strange pleasure. She had, indeed, been the one bright thing in his life, and even her wilfulness had a charm for him. He always gave way to it and was content. Had she not even once defied the uncle when no one else would have dared to do it? holding her little head up and confronting him in such a burst of pretty rage that the old curmudgeon ...
— The Pretty Sister Of Jose - 1889 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... whatsoever. They were really mad and vicious, insomuch that there was obliged to be a guard of soldiers to protect the presbytery. Dirt was flung upon us as we passed, and the finger of scorn held out to me. But I endured it with a resigned spirit, compassionating their wilfulness and blindness. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... in the lust of uncleanness is to live just like an unreasoning beast—according to mere sense and every kind of lust. So everything is ordered by the Pope, ordered as it has pleased him, and all must subserve their wilfulness and tyranny; and they have warped and explained all just as it has pleased them, and thereupon said, "the holy See at Rome cannot err," while there is not one who has preached anything of faith or love; but they have taught nothing except what they ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... But, as a matter of fact, all, or almost all, of his defects are not only counterbalanced by merits, but are themselves, in a great degree, exaggerations or perversions of what is intrinsically meritorious. With less wilfulness, with more attention to the literature, the events, the personages of his own time, with a more critical and common-sense attitude towards his own crotchets, Borrow could hardly have wrought out for himself ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... effects from the blind tenderness of infatuated passion is the noble blindness of Christian self-control. While the one warms into existence, or at least into open manifestation, all the selfishness and wilfulness of the fondled plaything, the other creates a thousand virtues that were not known before. Flowers spring up from the hardest rocks, the coldest, sternest natures are gradually softened into gentleness, the faults ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... angrily at her husband. "There's another instance of your wilfulness and want of taste. Who but you would have dreamed of giving the boy such a name? Why, it's the name of a river, not a Christian. No gentleman was ever called Thames, and Darrell is a gentleman, ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to do it so much the faster. Christ can crowd the work of years into hours. He did it with the dying thief. If the man who has set out early may take his time, it certainly cannot be so with us who have lost our time. If we have lost God's bright and happy presence by our wilfulness, what then? Unrelieved sadness? Nay, brethren, calmness, purity, may have gone from our heart; but all is not gone yet. Just as sweetness comes from the bark of the cinnamon when it is bruised, so ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... and whose earnings by charing cannot support herself and four children, heard Miss Macpherson speak at the Moorgate Street Hall Noon Prayer-Meeting, and was led to bring little Alice to her, pleading for Christian care. Amid many tears she tells of the wayward wilfulness of the elder girl, out at all hours of day and night, and whose pernicious example is too likely to ruin the ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... grace or feeling or spotless charm in his verse which did not belong to the man. There was never an explanation to be offered for him; no allowance was necessary for the eccentricity or grotesqueness or wilfulness or humor of genius. Simple, modest, frank, manly, he was the good citizen, the self-respecting gentleman, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... wife, in his way, for her personal beauty. He was very proud of her; he was piqued to the last degree by her frankness. He could not but acknowledge the truth of what she said, that she had been persuaded into the match when but a child; for she seemed a very infant now, in wilfulness and ignorance of the world. But I believe neither he nor her father had one compunctious misgiving as to their having profaned the holiness of marriage by such an union. Their minds had never been opened to the true meaning of life, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... despair, poor soul! I had a thousand times sooner hear you say that you cannot mend than that you can. For those who really feel they cannot mend—those who are really weary and worn out with the burden of their sins—those who are tired out with their own wilfulness, and feel ready to lie down and die, like a spent horse, and say, "God take me away, no matter to what place; I am not fit to live here on earth, a shame and a torment to myself day and night"—those who are in that state of mind are very near—very ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... whence he was is Siuph. Now at the first the Egyptians despised Amasis and held him in no great regard, because he had been a man of the people and was of no distinguished family; but afterwards Amasis won them over to himself by wisdom and not wilfulness. Among innumerable other things of price which he had, there was a foot-basin of gold in which both Amasis himself and all his guests were wont always to wash their feet. This he broke up, and of it he caused to be made the image of a god, ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... not been a boy; and with that Joan had to content herself. Maybe also her mother's illness had helped to sadden him. Or perhaps it was mere temperament, as she argued to herself later, for which they were both responsible. Those little tricks of coaxing, of tenderness, of wilfulness, by means of which other girls wriggled their way so successfully into a warm nest of cosy affection: she had never been able to employ them. Beneath her self-confidence was a shyness, an immovable reserve ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... Bedingfeld! I will have no man true to me, your Grace, But one that pares his nails; to me? the clown! For like his cloak, his manners want the nap And gloss of court; but of this fire he says, Nay swears, it was no wicked wilfulness, Only a natural chance. ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
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