Cross-grained

It is quite wonderful to me, in such a cross-grained, hardening, and harsh world as ours, where she can have contrived to keep so much of open, fresh, and kindly feeling.

It was my old cross-grained companion, Professor Summerlee. "What!" he cried. "Don't tell me that you have had one of these preposterous telegrams for oxygen?" I exhibited it.

For five minutes, Tommy sat on the bed in the dingy room next door. His heart was beating violently. He had risked all on this throw. How would they decide? And all the while that this agonized questioning went on within him, he talked flippantly to Conrad, enraging the cross-grained doorkeeper to the point of homicidal mania.