His brief infatuation had run its course.

His judgment had been whirled--he told himself it had been whirled, but it had really only been tweaked--from its centre, had performed its giddy orbit, and now the check-string had brought it back to the point from whence it had set out, namely, that she was merely a pretty woman.
"I will break with her gradually," he said, like the tyro he was, and he pictured to himself the wretched scenes in which she would abuse him, reproach him, probably compromise herself, the letters she would write to him.

At any rate, he need not read them.

Oh! how tired he was of the whole thing beforehand.

Why had he been such a fool?
He looked at the termination of the liaison as a bad sailor looks at an inevitable sea passage at the end of a journey.