A certain degree of unwillingness

Usage examples of reluctance.

When Inanna insisted she have another, it was easy to show ambivalence, both attraction and reluctance at the same time.

He was bewildered, for instance, by her new and to him quite inexplicable reluctance to respond to their familiar urinary tune by singing the antistrophe that signified assent, and crouching to relieve herself.

Braden as her unique scent, but she allowed herself to be herded upstairs by her cousin, the scuffing of her shoes betraying her reluctance.

Ibryen gave a curt nod and, with a hint of reluctance at being taken from this impromptu vigil, Marris led the Traveller into the Council Hall.

His reluctance to look ignorant overweighed his slight worry that the others might actually have overlooked that matter.

Trouble looked at van Liesvelt, recognizing her own reluctance and impatient with it, but unable quite to control it.

Master and Miss Percevals, the reversionary sum of 21,000 pounds a year of the public money, and having just failed in a desperate and rapacious attempt to secure to himself for life the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster: and the best of it is, that this minister, after abusing his predecessors for their impious bounty to the Catholics, has found himself compelled, from the apprehension of immediate danger, to grant the sum in question, thus dissolving his pearl in vinegar, and destroying all the value of the gift by the virulence and reluctance with which it was granted.

After a time, Simson, with a certain caution and bodily reluctance, as it seemed to me, went out with his roll of taper into this space.

If they were sometimes tempted by a sally of passion, or by the hopes of concealment, to indulge their favorite superstition, their humble repentance disarmed the severity of the Christian magistrate, and they seldom refused to atone for their rashness, by submitting, with some secret reluctance, to the yoke of the Gospel.

Kutuzov was silent for a few seconds and then, submitting with evident reluctance to the duty imposed by his position, raised his head and began to speak.

Imperial edicts were subscribed with alacrity or reluctance by the four patriarchs of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch.

Marillier dwelt on this thought, in spite of his reluctance to look at the fetich and ascertain for himself how much of life and power remained in it, a sense of superphysical elation filled him.

Dowdy believed that his initial reluctance to run the gauntlet in Nasiriyah after Task Force Tarawa stumbled into the unanticipated battle there had set a tone and that he was unfairly depicted as too hesitant by Kelly regarding an operation in Kut that Mattis himself had never planned.

O poisoner of children, surely it would be better to cut the knot of reluctance and uncord the casket of explanation.

Eventually, with simulated reluctance, he opened the holdall, quickly wound the unexposed film to an end and emptied the camera.