When they travelled to Rome that spring of 1964, she found Francis introspective and self-absorbed. On May 30, recalling how she had the previous year so much imagined their “combined presence” there, she recorded her disappointment, her sense of prospects thwarted:

Borghese Gardens. Here I sit where I sat five years ago, in tutti sensi. Paradoxically, this city never seemed more beautiful, this morning with the slightly uncertain sun, light breeze—oh the trees are marvellous, not yet harmed by the summer. It is—God—some joke so stale, so predictable that it would hardly be worth playing on someone. The whole city cries out with life—pleasure, romance, serenity. This journey—how many years imagined—touches all the nerves, of memory, disappointment, of the worst kind. Touches, alas, that nerve full of tears, that particular hurt, so I sit here …