That sauce was made up of contradictions and sufferings, of agonising inward analysis, and all these pangs and pinpricks gave a certain piquancy, even a significance to my dissipation⁠—in fact, completely answered the purpose of an appetising sauce. There was a certain depth of meaning in it. And I could hardly have resigned myself to the simple, vulgar, direct debauchery of a clerk and have endured all the filthiness of it. What could have allured me about it then and have drawn me at night into the street? No, I had a lofty way of getting out of it all.