If he go wrong it must be by sheer perversity, an arrogant insistence upon being governed by his own ignorant inclinations.

To a considerable element of the town it seemed to be mere innate perversity.

Here again the pedants under consideration exhibit the illogical perversity that makes the brain reel.

The temptation to equivocate for pure perversity's sake was strong upon Elinor, and she yielded to it.

"Wretched woman, to what monstrous perversity have you fallen!

Ralph, swept forward on the blast of his excitement, felt as in a dream the frivolous perversity of her receiving him in such a setting instead of in their usual quiet corner; but there was no room in his mind for anything but the cry that broke from him: "I believe I've done it!"

"He repaired," says a contemporary chronicler, "to the castle of Vertfeuil (or Verfeil, in the district of Toulouse), where flourished at that time the scions of a numerous nobility and of a multitude of people, thinking that, if he could extinguish heretical perversity in this place where it was so very much spread, it would be easy for him to make head against it elsewhere.

To a considerable element of the town it seemed to be mere innate perversity.

However, there are some pessimists for whom indigestion can plead no excuse, but for whose intellectual perversity some other cosmic influence must be sought "behind the veil, behind the veil,"to borrow Mr. Laing's favourite line from his favourite poem.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country.

The notion that the world has a physical but not a moral meaning, is the most mischievous error sprung from the greatest mental perversity.

The loss of her son, the childlessness to which she was condemned, all threw her into a state of morbid perversity, fraught with dreams of some monstrous vengeance which she dared not even confess to herself.

With a perversity sometimes noticeable in the wives of distinguished men, Mrs. Sterne had failed to accept with enthusiasm the rôle of distant and humbly admiring spectator of her brilliant husband's triumphs.

She withdrew, with what seemed an obstinate perversity, into her own magnificent obscurity.

She ran to her mount feeling as if Guy were behind her, and with an odd perversity she would not look round to disillusion herself.

With that queer perversity of human nerves, he kept biting his sore teeth together as he walked along.

At last she said, and with the querulous perversity of the sick- 'But even if I wished to go abroad, with whom could I go?' Hubert fell into the trap, and, noticing the sudden brightness in his eyes, a cloud of disappointment shadowed hers.

In Ohio, it is called the salmon, and by the Canadians the pickerel, while, with singular perversity, they persist in calling our pickerel a pike.

"Without the Proprieties," said the Master, "we have these results: for deferential demeanor, a worried one; for calm attentiveness, awkward bashfulness; for manly conduct, disorderliness; for straightforwardness, perversity.

" A sudden perversity had taken me to show myself at my most prosaic and unromantic.

She had had but one chance at Europe since her marriage, and that had been wasted through her husband's unaccountable perversity.

A more valid accusation touches the many verbal perversities, in which a poet has less right than another to indulge.

And you, Gertrude, what necessity can there be in your troubling yourself to amuse people whom you meet every day of your life, and who, from the vulgar perversity of society, value you in exact proportion as you neglect them?' 'Yes, but to-day I must be attentive; for Henry, with his usual thoughtlessness, has asked this new bishop to dine with us.'

What wicked perversity made you fix upon me who, even if I had not belonged to any one else, could never, never have fancied you!" "Is that true?" he says, in a harsh, rough whisper; "are you sure that you are not deceiving yourself?

It is one of the narrownesses of Durtal himself to ascribe all this to the wilful perversity of a person or persons unknown, and not to see in it the inevitable result of the vulgarizing tendency of modern life upon the masses.