Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish.… - Gore Vidal

After the script was ready there were the usual trials, delays, problems of temperament: each participant confident the others had gone into secret league to contrive his professional ruin (and on occasion cabals did flourish…the theater is a child’s world).

As Seward did not understand the reference, he did not ask for an explanation. In any case, he had a constitutional dislike of being told things that he did not know, as opposed to ferreting them out.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.