She said, very low, 'Yes, Arthur,' as if she were assenting to some statement I had made, as perhaps she was.
I somehow found that I had caught her hands in mine, and so we stood together, but still I said nothing but 'Jane,' because that was all that, for the moment, I knew.
Hobart stood in the open doorway, looking at us, white and quiet.
'Good-evening,' he said.
We fell apart, loosing each other's hands.
'You're early back, Oliver,' said Jane, composedly.
'Earlier, obviously,' he returned, 'than I was expected.'
My anger, my hatred, my contempt for him and my own shame blazed in me together. I faced him, black and bitter, and he was not only to me Jane's husband, the suspicious, narrow-minded ass to whom she was tied, but, much more, the Potterite, the user of cant phrases, the ignorant player to the gallery of the Pinkerton press, the fool who had so little sense of his folly that he disputed on facts with the experts who wrote for the Weekly Fact. In him, at that moment, I saw all the Potterism of this dreadful world embodied, and should have liked to have struck it dead.
'What exactly,' I asked him, 'do you mean by that?'
He smiled.