Mr. Duffy's life is quite solitary. He prefers to keep to himself and not "entangle" his life with anyone else's. His furniture is almost completely black and white in color, and this seems to be symbolic of how he likes to live; he does not care for figurative gray areas and prefers everything be kept neat, with clear boundaries. As a result, he doesn't do or feel much of anything.

Mr. Duffy's refusal of Mrs. Sinico's affectionate advances leads to her demise because, as he learns later from the news story about her death, she began drinking heavily shortly afterward, and this eventually led to her suicide. She must have lost hope after he rejected her, as we know that her husband doesn't really show much interest in her anymore. The narrator reports that Captain Sinico "had dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect that anyone else would take an interest in her." When Mr. Duffy also dismissed her, she must have succumbed to depression and desolation.

It is somewhat ironic that Mr. Duffy's refusal to participate in an adulterous affair with Mrs. Sinico led to tragedy, as we would most likely expect tragedy to come of illicit behaviors rather than as a rejection of it. It turns out that this adulterous relationship would be Mr. Duffy's only opportunity to have a loving relationship at all, and his refusal to get involved in something that seemed so messy to him, emotionally, results in both Mrs. Sinico's eventual death and his permanent exclusion from "life's feast."