If you argue with him, he's silent.

He cares for nothing but his business." Arthur did not hesitate to speak thus frankly to Mrs.Whitney.She seemed a member of the family, like a sister of his mother or father who had lived with them always; also he accepted her at the valuation she and all her friends set upon her--he, like herself and them, thought her generous and unselfish because she was lavish with sympathetic words and with alms--the familiar means by which the heartless cheat themselves into a reputation for heart.

She always left the objects of her benevolence the poorer for her ministrations, though they did not realize it.

She adopted as the guiding principle of her life the cynical philosophy--"Give people what they want, never what they need." By sympathizing effusively with those in trouble, she encouraged them in low-spiritedness; by lavishing alms, she weakened struggling poverty into pauperism.

But she took away and left behind enthusiasm for her own moral superiority and humanity.
Also she deceived herself and others with such fluid outpourings of fine phrases about "higher life" and "spiritual thinking" as so exasperated Hiram Ranger.
Now, instead of showing Arthur what her substratum of shrewd sense enabled her to see, she ministered soothingly unto his vanity.