When Jessie visited Lawrence in London in November 1909 he introduced her to a woman he had ‘almost decided to marry’ (ET 164). This was Agnes Holt, a fellow-teacher two years older than him. Jessie thought Agnes ‘talked to Lawrence rather like an elder sister, and there was about him a curious air of bravado that [Jessie] always felt arose from lack of conviction’ (ET 168).

The night before this meeting Lawrence gave Jessie the manuscript of A Collier's Friday Night and talked ‘very earnestly’ to her till two in the morning. He asked her what she hoped for in life, which reduced her to tears, and told her that he found the strain of life alone in London so hard to bear that he might ‘peg out’. He couldn't afford to marry, so had decided to ‘ask some girl if she will give me … that … without marriage.’ Did Jessie think that any girl would? She answered that she thought Lawrence wouldn't like the kind of girl who ‘would’. Then he asked her if she thought it wrong. Jessie answered with her habitual honesty:

This is one of many extraordinary exchanges that are recorded between Lawrence and Jessie. He had told her that he had no sexual feeling for her, that she was completely lacking in sexual attraction, that she was a nun who could play no part in physical love, yet he seemed to care what she thought and felt about this pressing question. If one read this exchange without any knowledge of its context one would think it was the prelude to a proposition to Jessie. But no. Lawrence went on: ‘Well, I think I shall ask her. Do you think she would?’ Jessie's searingly self-revealing answer was, ‘It depends how much she is in love with you’ (ET 167–68).

In one of his affected letters to Blanche Jennings Lawrence wrote,