She displayed a small voice and a tentative way with phrasing.

Phillips returned the man's smile in a half-hearted, tentative way.

He started, possibly, in a merely tentative way by slugging one of the family circle.

She wasn't, and much later, with darkness in the room, I felt her move beside me in a tentative way.

She sat up straight and held her hands up before her in a very delicate, tentative way.

In a tentative way, Bran became friends with the skinny, freckled boy who had first spoken to him.

Science is great that way; always tentative, always at the brink of the known.

And in his own tentative way, he's a moralist.

He was uttering it in the tentative way that someone does when confronted with an unfamiliar term.

The tentative way she approached him looked like someone trying to figure something out.