e be better evidence of Mrs.
Arment's complete disinterestedness?

If the reasoning by which her friends justified her course was somewhat
cruder and less complex than her own elucidation of the matter, both
explanations led to the same conclusion: John Arment was impossible.
The only difference was that, to his wife, his impossibility was
something deeper than a social disqualification. She had once said, in
ironical defence of her marriage, that it had at least preserved her
from the necessity of sitting next to him at dinner; but she had not
then realized at what cost the immunity was purchased. John Arment was
impossible; but the sting of his impossibility lay in the fact that he
made it impossible for those about him to be other than himself. By an
unconscious process of elimination he had excluded from the world
everything of which he did not feel a personal need: had become, as it
were, a climate in which only his own requirements survived. This might
seem to imply a deliberate selfishness; but there was nothing
deliberate about Arment. He was as instinctive as an animal or a child.
It was this childish element in his nature which sometimes for a moment
unsettled his wife's estimate of him. Was it possible that he was
simply undeveloped, that he had delayed, somewhat longer than is usual,
the laborious process of growing up? He had the kind of sporadic
shrewdness which causes it to be said of a dull man that he is "no
fool"; and it was this quality that his wife found most trying. Even to
the naturalist it is annoying to have his deductions disturbed by some
unforeseen aberrancy of form or function; and how much more so to the
wife whose estimate of herself is inevitably bound up with her judgment
of her husband!

Arment's shrewdness did not, indeed, imply any latent intellectual
power; it suggested, rather, potentialities of feeling, of suffering,
perhaps, in a blind rudimentary way, on which Julia's sensibilities
naturally declined to linger. She so fully understood her own reasons
for leaving him that she disliked to think they were not as
comprehensible to her husband. She was haunted, in her analytic
moments, by the look of perplexity, too inarticulate for words, with
which he had acquiesced to her explanations.

These moments were rare with her, however. Her marriage had been too
concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically. If she had been
unhappy for complex reasons, the unhappiness was as real as