It was not all misery. In later years she recalled “Alec and I on foot over the hills from Aberdeen to Hong Kong, a lovely deserted path and prospect, a bird alighted on the path, and we were still. He said, low-voiced, ‘I think it’s a plover.’ Such pleasures were new to me. Respect and curiosity for Nature.” At the time, she’d been caught up in feeling. Her diary entries see her circling back again and again to the same points of elation and despair. In February: “Alec was good to me again. Although I don’t feel I can go on much more without something more definite. He is unfair. Why should he pick me up and toss me down like this? Please let it be different soon.” In March: “(Please, God.) I wish it didn’t look so appalling in black and white. I don’t feel that he’s obliged to return my feeling, but he has made the best of it as it suited him. This is awful. If he doesn’t ring this weekend, it’s all up, I think,” and then three days later, “a lovely day” at the Bank. “He took me in his arms and was suddenly wild-eyed and passionate and ‘wicked and loose’ … I am happy and hopeful.” Then in early April, “I’m struggling against this neglected feeling, knowing I have no right to be so, but oh Alec, am I not good enough?” Everything was intensified by the way the relationship was playing out in a very closed and constrained social world and across a very compressed stretch of time—by September, one short year after meeting Alec, she had left Hong Kong. While her inner world was being tormented by the peaks and troughs of adolescent romance, her social life in the privileged contours of colonial Hong Kong continued. It is notable that despite the intensity of her emotions, those around her appeared to have no idea of the romance, although there was some gentle ribbing from coworkers about “the eyes of Ahlex.” Outside work hours, she was attending parties, sometimes with her family or with friends from the office, sometimes with Alec, or going to dinners at the Tientsin, or the Parisian Grill, or King Fu, and lunches at the Clubhouse at Deep Water Bay. On days off she would join outings to beaches around the island—spectacular locations, less than an hour’s drive from Central, such as Shek O, Repulse Bay, Deep Water Bay, or Stanley—with Alan, Chris, Alec, and others from the office, sometimes conveyed by army jeep. Or she went walking.