Paltering refers to talking or acting insincerely or misleadingly.
In Dickens' Tale of Two Cities there is a place where he says
The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the paltering lumps of dull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun changed them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was glowing.
In Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Antony says at one point
Now I must
To the young man send humble treaties, dodge
And palter in the shifts of lowness, who
With half the bulk o' th' world play'd as I pleas'd,
Making and marring fortunes.
I came across the word in a translation of Albert Camus' work The Plague (Page 11 in the Penguin edition).
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