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It was thus that the archdeacon looked at it, and as he did so, he thought that his son was the most cross-grained of men. But the major had his own way of looking at the matter. He had, he flattered himself, dealt very fairly with his father. When he had first made up his mind to make Miss Crawley his wife, he had told his father of his intention.
"I should like my children to be saints rather than great noblemen," said Madame de Gondi when she presented the boys to their tutor, but the prospect seemed remote enough. The violent temper and obstinacy of his charges were a great trial to Vincent, who used to say in later life that they had taught him, cross-grained as he was by nature, how to be gentle and patient.
"My lord," said Bywater, turning his red, impudent, but honest face full upon the prelate, "I don't deny that we do provoke him; but you can have no idea what an awful tyrant he is to us. I can't believe any one was ever born with such a cross-grained temper. He vents it upon every one: not only upon the college boys, but upon all who come in his way.
He handed Willie a piece of cross-grained wood and a blunt knife. Willie looked at both, smiled, and shook his head. "It would take a cleverer feller than me to do it; but I'll try." Willie did try; after a quarter of an hour spent in vain attempts, he threw down the wood and knife exclaiming, "It's impossible."
I declare, he sometimes makes me wish he were dead and buried." "Oh, he'll live long enough yet, never fear those wiry, cross-grained people are as tough as lightwood knots. It's a pity, though, he wants to bully you like that it would kill me in a day." A flush mounted to Will's forehead. "I knew you'd think so," he said, "and it's what I tell him all the time.
He might get them all together, explain, persuade.... Goddy! it was for their good. They needn't be cross-grained. There it would be, the offer, for them to take or leave. But, if they delayed, watch out! Railroad people couldn't be fooled with. They might get left; that was all. This, he felt, was more than he could undertake, more than any reasonable person would ask.
You may judge from that the disordered state of my faculties and my complete moral prostration. At last, ashamed of abusing Alfred's hospitality in such a manner, and feeling incapable of being anything else than irritable, cross-grained and intractable, I returned to Richeport, to be as gloomy and disagreeable as I pleased.
His object was to sound our surly friend David Maxwell about joining him in his intended trip to the antipodes, for Maxwell was a first-rate diver, though a somewhat cross-grained man. Maxwell was under water when he arrived. It was Baldwin's duty to superintend part of the works. He therefore went down, and met his man at the bottom of the sea.
It's rather a cross-grained situation. Wollaston doesn't like me. He thinks I'm responsible for his wife's having kicked over the traces and signed up to sing at Ravinia this summer. In a way, I suppose I am. She's planning to use that opera of mine, you remember, The Outcry we called it for a novelty, provided they like the way I've padded up her part.
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