Despair's Last Journey by David Christie Murray

And now the mind of the Exile turned to the episode of Norah MacMulty -- grotesque, pitiable, laughable.

Paul had pssed his seventeenth birthday, and reckoned himself a man. He was in love again, but tentatively. He had read 'Don Juan,' and had learned a thing or two. He conceived that he had rubbed off the first soft bloom of youth, and the idea, natural to his time of life, that he was aged and experienced had taken full hold of him.