recreance

• And, if you should find out the veritable name of your weak confessing scribe, think not the less kindly of his graver volumes; this one is his pastime, his holiday laugh, his purposely truant, lawless, desultory recreance: impute not folly to the face of cheerfulness; be charitable to such mixtures of alternate gayety and soberness as in thine own mind, if thou searchest, thou shall find; let me laugh with those that laugh, as well as sympathize with weepers; and cavil not at those inconsistencies, which of a verity are man's right attributes Ideas lie round about us, thick as daisies in a summer meadow. —  An Author's Mind : The Book of Title-pages
• Nor your ingenious recreance to think —  Children of the Night
• He smiled to see her grieving at this recreance of her memory to her conscience. —  The Lady of the Aroostook
• Bethought himself, to ease his heart, some recreance to find, —  A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 6
• They remembered their Ruskinian youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it; and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under —  Complete March Family Trilogy

Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms