§ 3
"That meeting had a profound effect upon me. It banished much aimless reverie from my mind; it unlocked the prison in which a whole multitude of forbidden thoughts had been confined. I thought enormously of Hetty. They were vague and impossible thoughts; they came in the night, on the way to business, even during slack moments in business hours; rehearsals of dramatised encounters, explanations, magic turns of circumstances that suddenly restored our lost world to us. I tried to suppress these cloudy imaginations but with little avail; they overspread my mental skies in spite of me. I can't tell you how many times I walked through those gardens in Regent's Park; that detour became my normal route from the station to my home. And I would even go out of my customary way along some side-path because I had caught a glimpse far off, between the tree-branches and the flower-beds, of a solitary woman. But Hetty never came back there.
"In my brooding over Hetty a jealousy and hatred of Sumner developed steadily. I do not think I had any desire for Hetty myself but I wanted intensely to get her away from him. This hostility to Sumner was the ugly undertow of my remorse and re-awakened love of Hetty. He was the evil thing that had deprived me of Hetty. I did not reflect for a moment that it was I with my relentless insistence upon divorce that had forced her back to him.
"And all this dreaming and brooding and futile planning, all this body of desire for something more to happen between Hetty and myself, went on without my breathing a word of it to any living soul. It was on my conscience that it was disloyal to Milly, and I even made a half-hearted attempt to tell Milly that I had met Hetty and been shocked at her poverty and unhappiness. I wanted to bring her into my own state of mind and have her feel as I did. I threw out a remark one day—we had gone to Hampstead Heath for a walk one afternoon—that I had once walked along that ridge by the Round Pond with Hetty during my last leave. 'I wonder how she is living now,' I said.
"Milly did not answer immediately, and when I looked at her her face was flushed and hard. 'I hoped you had forgotten her,' she said in a suffocated voice.
"'This brought it back to me.'
"'I try never to think of her. You don't know what that woman meant to me—the humiliation.
"'It was not only for myself,' she added. 'It was for you.'
"She said no more but it was manifest how terribly the mere name of Hetty had disturbed her."
"Poor little things!" cried Firefly. "How insanely jealous you all were!"