He's not really a dandy, but neither is he careless about his appearance. He is not a libertine. He has a wife he loves, and two children. And yet he likes women. But he's never made a career as a "lady's man." He believes that that sort of career is a career of contemptible "substitution" and most suspect. That anyone who has never known the love of a single woman has never really known what it is to love, has perhaps never even attained real manhood.

It's for this very reason that his affair with the young French woman is a real love affair, even though it's a chance adventure. It's because he doesn't believe in the virtue of chance affairs that he can live this one with such sincerity, with such violence.