Unlike Robert Salesby in ‘The Man Without a Temperament’, Murry appeared to settle into his new life abroad with Mansfield in 1921 without apparent signs of repressed resentment. Robert Salesby had been cast adrift with nothing to occupy himself but the daily rituals of taking tea with his wife and bringing her a shawl. The one essential quality that Mansfield had neglected to give him was a dedication to the act of writing. In contrast, Murry would find himself suddenly freed from the exhaustive entanglements – professional and social – of the Athenaeum, and now ready to pursue his creative endeavours. It should be noted here also – as Alpers has suggested – that Murry's removal from the editorship meant ‘the parting of the ways between the Murrys and Bloomsbury as a whole’ (Alpers 1980: 331). For, without Murry's influence as an editor to consider, Woolf and her friends had no need to pretend to interest in him and their barely submerged hostility need no longer be held in check.

During his stay in Menton in the first months of the year, Murry started work on his second novel, The Things We Are, and completed a series of lectures which he delivered at Oxford in May, and published the next year under the title The Problem of Style. By the end of June, he had joined Mansfield in the mountains of Switzerland, at the Chalet des Sapins in Montana-sur-Sierre, where they lived in productive intimacy and tranquillity.