In New York, Shirley was deep in writing. She spent the weeks before leaving for Spain working frantically on The Evening of the Holiday, the first instalment of which had been scheduled for publication in The New Yorker the following month. At that stage it was still called “The Fountain”; it is possible that the change of title was a response to the report Shirley had read of Elena’s last days, the reading of the Leopardi poem that had struck her so tellingly when she’d first read it fifteen years earlier. Shirley was also enjoying the fact as well as the prospect of closer intimacy with Francis and reflecting on the abandoned visit to Rome: “I still feel slightly odd but less so than before; no doubt getting accustomed.” In requesting delay, he was perhaps setting out just the kind of complication—of sensibility, and seriousness—that her earlier relationships had lacked, suggesting grounds on which marriage might start to become thinkable.