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Updated: June 17, 2025


Charles's easy humour cloaked an obstinacy as strong as that of any of his race. Be the object perverse enough, it asserted itself, in his facile character, with the pettishness to be found in a spoilt child. He knew Clarendon's opinion of "the Lady," whose acquaintance the Chancellor shunned, and to whom he had forbidden his wife to show any civilities.

She 'supposed they could go, and 'didn't see what good it would do them'; she had twenty different views, and all of them more or less mixed up with pettishness, as to the best place for a picnic on a gray day; and at last she grew so difficult that Robert suspected something desperately wrong with the household, and withdrew lest male guests might be in the way.

But these paroxysms seldom occurred, and in them my big-hearted shipmate vented the bile which more calm-tempered individuals get rid of by a continual pettishness at trivial annoyances. No one ever saw Toby laugh. I mean in the hearty abandonment of broad-mouthed mirth.

On such occasions, Oldbuck, considering that the Baronet's pettishness resembled that of a child, usually showed his superior sense by compassionately making the first advances to reconciliation. But it once or twice happened that the aristocratic pride of the far-descended knight took a flight too offensive to the feelings of the representative of the typographer.

Without such virtues no association of man could survive for a year. If the world managed its societies as the Church manages its unity, they would collapse quickly. Indeed it is a strong presumption in favour of Christianity that the Churches have not killed it long ago. Vanity, pride, self-importance, masterfulness, pettishness get full play among us. Diotrephes has many descendants to-day.

About an hour afterwards, and when the Rabbi was only entering into the heart of the matter, Carmichael made the bitter discovery without the Rabbi having even hinted at such a thing that his pet sermon was a mass of boyish crudities, and this reverse of circumstances was some excuse for his pettishness.

The expression of his moods has the old touch of irritability, too, in its excess of language, its air of confiding something that one would not say aloud, its half-conscious pettishness. In March, 1854, he writes to Bridge, in this character, though here possibly it is the presence of politics that is the disturbing factor:

I did not consider that it must take time to change local and national habits and prejudices; and that it is necessary to raise a taste for comforts, before they can be properly enjoyed. In the pettishness of my disappointment, I decided that it was in vain to attempt to improve and civilize such people as the Irish.

But really there was something quite charming in her pettishness: it looked so much more like innocent distress than ill humour; and the severe Adam felt no movement of disapprobation; he only felt a sort of amused pity, as if he had seen a kitten setting up its back, or a little bird with its feathers ruffled.

When she wept and sobbed as though her heart would break, and bemoaned her miseries in the sweetest voice that ever fell upon a listener's ear, who could be insensible to the little winning pettishness which now and then displayed itself, even in the sincerity and earnestness of her grief?

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