She mused in her diary on the alignment of passion and morality shadowed by her own sense of fated misalignment—the coming-round of things and the too-late that are so completely expressed in The Transit of Venus—in her new novel. And she reflected on the timing of her own coming to love: “Reading these excruciating letters, our tragic story, I realise that one—and at any rate I—needed half a lifetime to prepare to deserve—or to be a person who might deserve—love; to subdue self and to comfort, nurture, inspire perhaps and share the life of such a man. We need what we can’t have: the rehearsal for the rightful life. With … Francis it came right, as right as ever such a life can be. The strangeness of this dichotomy, the re-living of a great love.” The coming “right” of her life with Francis now seemed to provide the “happy ending” of her past story with Alec, a happy ending that she sought to write into the book.