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-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair.  If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.  She, for one, would have no share in maintaining the pretence of which she had been a victim:  the pretence that a man and a woman, forced into the narrowest of personal relations, must remain there till the end, though they may have outgrown the span of each other’s natures as the mature tree outgrows the iron brace about the sapling.