a refusal disguised as bad advice

 or even a refusal disguised as bad advice, without ever directly mentioning the issue of sex and freedom as I saw it --- all that poor, quick love, which if prolonged in time threatened peace of mind with a combination of empty adventure and pathological recriminatory vanity --- my success in all this was perhaps due to my distant air, reading in my room, while other desires that were rapidly growing within me weakened them with a hopeless feeling of the very disposable reason for everything --- at these times I spent myself in the company of old bohemian companions, who later came to tread the boulevard where I live, already instinctively cautious, foreseeing everything that was still happening, all that misery of occasional worldly affections and the irrepressible bedroom smile that all this brought to their faces, when they came to know everything in detail, amid toasts and jokes --- the old friends spied on my face too, they played for me the old trick that kept us together in a complicity full of failures and noises of communication ---was I then speaking seriously there, with a feigned economy of details that revealed almost everything between the lines, and full of a strange predisposition to read consent and approval in their eyes? ---certainly, no sudden resolution would make me retreat in my spirit of weaving little by little the indistinct, the indeterminate, in the narrow or the broad means