Mr Duffy ends his relationship with Mrs Sinico

Mr Duffy ends his relationship with Mrs Sinico when her attempt at physical intimacy unsettles the intellectual bond he had allowed to grow between them. His response converts companionship into a threat to his carefully maintained independence: he withdraws, meets her to end their intercourse, and resumes his orderly life, but the separation leaves its mark in avoidance and in a written sentence that reduces love and friendship to impossible alternatives.

From Confession to Intimacy

Mrs Sinico had become Mr Duffy’s confidante, listening to his theories and urging him to open himself more fully. He visited her cottage outside Dublin often, and they spent many evenings alone. As their thoughts gradually turned from remote subjects to more personal ones, their companionship altered his inner life: he felt it softening his character and giving his intellectual existence greater emotional warmth.

Their intimacy took shape in a private atmosphere of darkness and music. They sometimes let the evening fall without lighting the lamp; the dim room, their isolation, and music still vibrating in their ears seemed to draw them together. Mr Duffy imagined that he might rise to an angelic stature in Mrs Sinico’s eyes, yet he also heard, in what he recognized as his own impersonal voice, the insistence that the soul is incurably lonely and that people belong to themselves. The relationship thus held opposing possibilities: emotional attachment brought him closer to another person even as his own doctrine of separateness remained audible within him.

The Gesture and the Rupture

The decisive break came one night when Mrs Sinico showed unusual excitement, caught Mr Duffy’s hand passionately, and pressed it to her cheek. He was very much surprised. He understood her gesture as evidence that she had interpreted his words and their closeness differently from him, and that recognition disillusioned him. Rather than respond by exploring the mismatch, he stopped visiting her for a week.

He then wrote asking her to meet. To keep their last interview from being troubled by the influence of their ruined confessional, he chose a small cakeshop near Parkgate. Despite the cold autumn weather, they walked up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. There they agreed to break off their intercourse. Mr Duffy stated his governing conclusion plainly: every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow. The physical intensity of Mrs Sinico’s gesture had opened a gulf between them; the long walk gave the separation a deliberate form, but did not make it mutual in feeling.

Separation and Its Aftermath

After leaving the Park, they walked silently toward the tram. Mrs Sinico began trembling so violently that Mr Duffy feared she might suffer another collapse. He said goodbye quickly and left her. A few days later, a parcel arrived containing his books and music, returning the objects associated with their shared intellectual and musical life and marking the relationship’s end in material form.

Four years passed, and Mr Duffy returned to his even routine. His room continued to reflect the orderliness of his mind; new music occupied the stand, and two books by Nietzsche stood on his shelves. He wrote seldom in the papers in his desk. One sentence, written two months after the final interview, declared that love between men was impossible without sexual intercourse, while friendship between a man and a woman was impossible because sexual intercourse must occur. Its rigid symmetry turns the experience into a general rule, but also exposes how thoroughly he has closed off forms of attachment rather than reconciled their emotional and physical dimensions.

Avoidance and Significance

Mr Duffy kept away from concerts lest he meet Mrs Sinico. His withdrawal therefore outlasted the formal break: even the possibility of encountering her was enough to shape his movements. Meanwhile, his daily pattern continued—he went into the city by tram each morning and walked home each evening after dining moderately in George’s Street and reading the evening paper for dessert. The routine restores the surface of the life he had before the relationship, but its precautions reveal that the past has not simply disappeared.

The episode turns on a contrast between the closeness Mr Duffy experiences and the independence he insists upon. Music, darkness, and conversation foster an intimacy that changes him, yet when Mrs Sinico’s gesture gives that intimacy a bodily meaning, he treats it as a misreading and withdraws. His maxim about bonds and sorrow makes separation sound like a principle; the trembling at the tram and his subsequent avoidance preserve the human consequences that the principle cannot contain.