tcasts desiring to return to the ways of virtue
would have been one of her most cherished and first realised
conceptions. She once attended, with other noble women, a gathering of
outcasts of their sex, and, being asked how they appeared to her,
replied, 'As women like myself, save that they are victims of wrong and
misfortune.'"

While labouring for the _Tribune_, Margaret Fuller was all the time
saving her money for the trip to Europe, which had her life long been
her dream of felicity; and at last, on the first of August, 1846, she
sailed for her Elysian Fields. There, in December, 1847, she was
secretly married, and in September, 1848, her child was born. What these
experiences must have meant to her we are able to guess from a glimpse
into her private journal in which she had many years before recorded
her profoundest feeling about marriage and motherhood.

"I have no home. No one loves me. But I love many a good deal, and see
some way into their eventful beauty.... I am myself growing better, and
shall by and by be a worthy object of love, one that will not anywhere
disappoint or need forbearance.... I have no child, and the woman in me
has so craved this experience that it has seemed the want of it must
paralyse me...."

The circumstances under which Margaret Fuller and her husband first met
are full of interest. Soon after Miss Fuller's arrival in Rome, early in
1847, she went one day to hear vespers at St. Peter's, and becoming
separated from her friends after the service, she was noted as she
examined the church by a young man of gentlemanly address, who,
perceiving her discomfort and her lack of Italian, offered his services
as a guide in her endeavour to find her companions.

Not seeing them anywhere, the young Marquis d'Ossoli, for it was he,
accompanied Miss Fuller home, and they met once or twice again before
she left Rome for the summer. The following season Miss Fuller had an
apartment in Rome, and she often received among her guests this young
patriot with whose labours in behalf of his native city she was
thoroughly in sympathy.

When the young man after a few months declared his love, Margaret
refused to marry him, insisting that he should choose a younger woman
for his wife. "In this way it rested for some weeks," writes Mrs. Story,
who knew them both, "during which we saw Ossoli pale, dejected, and
unhappy. He was always with Margaret, but in a sort of hopeless,
desperate manner, until at len