I soon hated the sight of my name in his handwriting.

It was not as if he had said outright that he wrote entirely to know whether I was watering his plant.
His references to it were introduced with all the appearance of afterthoughts.

Often they took the form of postscripts: "By the way, are you watering my chrysanthemum ?" or, "The chrysanthemum ought to be a beauty by this time;" or, "You must be quite an adept now at watering plants." Gilray declares now that, in answer to one of these ingenious epistles, I wrote to him saying that "I had just been watering his chrysanthemum." My belief is that I did no such thing; or, if I did, I meant to water it as soon as I had finished my letter.

He has never been able to bring this home to me, he says, because he burned my correspondence.

As if a business man would destroy such a letter.
It was yet more annoying when Gilray took to post-cards.