GR translation: though she never learned to arm herself against unexpected sight of him across a room

[Mike Jing]

V35.41-36.7, P36.22-29   Incredible black-and-white Scorpia confirmed not a
few Piratical fantasies about the glamorous silken-calved English realworld
he’d felt so shut away from. They got together while Clive was away on a
trouble-shooting mission for ICI in, of all places, Bahrein. The symmetry
of this helped Pirate relax about it some. They would attend parties as
strangers, though she never learned to arm herself against unexpected sight
of him across a room (trying to belong, as if he were not someone’s
employee).

What does this sentence imply about her reaction when she unexpectedly
catches sight of him across a room?