Mr. Duffy, a highly sophisticated Dublin intellectual, develops a love affair with Mrs. Sinico who turns out to be a lady of great sensibility and maternal warmth. Their turbulent affair, however, comes to an end when he denies her abrupt advance toward him. Four years later, Mrs. Sinico is reported killed in a train accident. The newspaper headlines it "A Painful Case." Yes, it is painful. Isn`t Mr. Duffy`s case painful, as well? This paper starts with the question and tries to lay bare Mr. Duffy`s personality issues. My argument is that he may be one who simply cannot bring himself to feel, emotionally as well as sexually. This partly explains why he is so driven, fastidiously orderly, and insulated from any communal life. That also explains his bizarre preference for recording rather than acting, thus fixing his life in the immediate past in the third person singular. His life is odd and tragic, but if we admit that he cannot avoid being himself, we can better understand who he is and how his affair ended up so quickly. At the narrative``s end, he achieves a kind of moral discovery about himself as well as his affair but that discovery is limited, considering that he is pathologically self-centered.