eeper 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 though it
had been uncomplicated. Soul is more bruisable than flesh, and Julia was
wounded in every fibre of her spirit. Her husband's personality seemed
to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the sky and cutting off
the air, till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of
her starved hopes. A sense of having been decoyed by some world-