" (Dubliners, page 224) This idea makes Gabriel think about life in general and how people die. This new feeling inside of him makes him realize that "The time has come for him to set on his journey westward." (Dubliners, page 225) Like Gabriel, Mr. Duffy, in A Painful Case, suffers from arrogance but unlike Gabriel never realizes that he is wrong.
Mr. Duffy is a person who tries to separate himself from the rest of the society and keep to himself. "Mr. James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious." (Dubliners, page 104) Mr. Duffy has been a cashier in the privet bank for many years. He goes to great lengths to keep his daily life simple by taking a train from Chapelizod to attend work in Dublin, and at midday goes to Dan Burke's with his lunch which consists of " a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits." (Dubliners, page 104) At four o'clock every day he stops working to dine in an eating-house in George's Street "where he felt himself safe from the society of Dublin's gilded youth and where there was a certain plain honesty in the bill of fare." (Dubliners, page 104) Mr. Duffy does not have a companion, friends, or a church. Mr. Duffy's spiritual life exists without communications with others, the only exceptions to this was seeing his parents on Christmas and burying them when they died. "He performed these two social duties for old dignity sake but concealed nothing further to the conversation which regulate the civic life." (Dubliners, page 105) His experience of self-centrism and exclusionism from social ranks ended once when he met Mrs. Sinico in the Rotunda.
Mrs. Sinico was a wife of a merchant boat captain who was plying between Dublin and Holland, and they had a baby girl. The meetings between Mr. Duffy and Mrs.