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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: 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
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