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“Her companionship was like a warm soil about an exotic.”
Mr. Duffy turns to figurative language to describe the depth of his connection with Mrs. Sinico. Through this simile, Mr. Duffy compares Mrs. Sinico’s life-fulfilling friendship to the soil that covers and nurtures the roots of an exotic plant. Mr. Duffy’s diction is significant because he essentially argues that his temperamental personality, like an exotic plant that can only grow in a specific climate, just needed the right atmosphere to bloom. Mrs. Sinico, with her warm presence and compassionate nature, provided that atmosphere and cured Mr. Duffy’s loneliness.
“He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt he had been outcast from life’s feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame.”
This moment occurs at the very end of the short story when Mr. Duffy is walking past the park near his home after he has learned of Mrs. Sinico’s death. He sees two lovers in the park. They are not specific people, but rather human figures that render the scene universal, and the sight reminds Mr. Duffy of his self-imposed exclusion from companionship. This moment also enacts a cycle of life and death that echoes throughout Dubliners: seeing the living, physical evidence of two people in love leads Mr. Duffy to think of the dead, of Mrs. Sinico, and then to reflect on his own existence.
