“‘There’s nothing about that man, my dear, that doesn’t absolutely exasperate me, and he won’t let me alone. He rings me up every hour of the day; he sends me letters by special messenger. I can’t get away from him. It seems incredible to me that eighteen months ago I couldn’t be happy away from him; that I could think of nothing but him; that my heart beat every time I heard the postman’s knock, every time the bell of the telephone rang. I don’t know how it happened. His wife, I think, very largely. I hated her, the great fat cow, so domineering and unwomanly. I hated the proprietary way in which she said, “my husband.” I wanted to humble her. There was pity in it, too: Paul looked so forlorn as he sat plucking at his beard while his wife’s voice boomed across the dinner table. But it’s hard enough to know how one felt a year and a half ago, let alone the “why” of it. I wanted him; that’s all that matters. I wanted him. It took a long time: little by little I broke down his reserve. I felt his sympathy, his interest in me, change to tenderness. His voice was like a diffident caress. I longed to throw myself into his arms; to be his utterly; to give him love as no other woman had ever given it him; and, then, within a couple of months he had become as every other man. They are all much the same when the glamour has passed. And, of course, I began to mean more to him every day; an endless flow of telephone calls and special messengers; desperate, imploring notes. He must see me. He couldn’t exist away from me. And all the time I was growing more and more tired of him; he exasperated me with his quiet voice and woman’s hands. I began to hate all the things about him that I had loved before: his weakness, his diffidence, his self-pity, his ceaseless references to his wife: how she bullied him; how he was dependent on her; how it would break his father’s heart were he to leave her; how he could not bear to leave his child. I grew as impatient of those two words “my wife,” as once I had of that proprietary “my husband.” I wanted to scream at him, “For God’s sake, be a man!” I tried to make him jealous by talking to him of earlier love affairs. No one, not even you, Gerald, knows as much about me as he does. I’ve told him all those little intimate things that would have made any other man hate me or hate himself for loving me. But nothing moved him.