Francis was at pains to explain his situation to her. Shirley summarised this later to Muriel:

A lot of remarks about not getting serious, I mustn’t think of this as love, etc. interspersed with displays of emotion, and passionate attention. I not knowing where I was in all this. Constant talk about wife, constant … Then … in tears, said he could not get used to difference in our ages (25 years); that he had had a Personality for a wife before and did not think he wanted it again … Didn’t really know what he wanted, future a great blank. He said he felt towards me as he felt when he was a child at school and someone offered him a prize: he went to pieces because he didn’t know how to handle it. That he had got into such a habit of calculating the future that he didn’t know how things would be if he didn’t work them out in advance.