Certainly she was free, for the time being, of her family and, if not cured of, distracted from her broken heart. But even so, daily life was laced with anxiety. While she continued to attract admirers among the expat bureaucrats, she was not interested in romance. She wrote that she pursued, that year, “a collection of silly, pointless affaires,” including, it seems, a dalliance with the American journalist Harold H. Martin, who told her in a letter from early 1957, shortly after leaving Naples, of “memories that were burning more brightly than I could wish,” and wishing that he could “strike that perfect plateau of impersonality which you so happily reached in your first communication.” None of these “affaires” were sustaining or salutary. Shirley hoped “each time” to find “some final diversion of my affections”; however “being with such relentless people I too have learned to be hard, to be selfish.”

She was also despairing about her future. Her lack of national connection was not yet the imaginative boon it would become in later life, when she could pronounce that it was “a privilege to be at home in more than one place.” For now she was unsettled, the pragmatics of living in Italy looking as if they might prove too much for her despite the tangible life to which they gave access. Her insecurity was no doubt fed by her sense of her flimsy status at the UN:

Now it grows near the end of the year of my assignment, I know that I must try the FAO [the Food and Agriculture Organization, a UN agency] in Rome, that my hopeless future—or lack of future—in NY cannot be re-accepted without an attempt elsewhere. Even loving Italy as I do, even so, I’m afraid: I’m afraid to live in a foreign non-Anglo-Saxon country always, to be cut off from my own background irrevocably and forever. But I have had so much need of solitary courage this past year that I believe I’m equal to anything, even to the more and more likely prospect of a barren, single life, working as a secretary or at most a clerk—well, I suppose that’s my fault and one should be glad to have had so much of the things that others covet.