What is "waywardness"

Usage examples of "waywardness".

That waywardness which was a legitimate inheritance from generations of wilful forebears, impatient of all those restraints which a fixed environment imposes upon the individual, an impatience which had always been hers though it slumbered in unsuspected latency, asserted itself of a sudden, possessed her wholly, and warmed, her being like forbidden wine.

If it lacked this splendid waywardness, ice would sink, and lakes and oceans would freeze from the bottom up.

We have learnt, indeed, to be more on the look-out for the disturbing influences of temperament in the judgments of this atrabilious observer than was the case when the Life of Sterling was written, and it is difficult to doubt that the unfavourable strokes in the above-quoted description have been unduly multiplied and deepened, partly in the mere waywardness of a sarcastic humour, and partly perhaps from a less excusable cause.

Too, for whatever defects, or waywardness, in her nature, she had hoped, first, for a higher match, regarding herself as quite worthy of it, and, secondly, to make matters far worse, had not been at all that enthralled with the pictorials of Tuvo Ausonius, who seemed to her to be a callow mediocrity.