if we could only come into school in
that way, we could know as much Greek as she did." She was accustomed
to fill the hood of her cloak with books, swing them over her
shoulder, and march away. "We wished," says this lady, "that our
mothers would let us have hooded cloaks, that we might carry our books
in the same way."

It is known that Margaret had several love affairs and, in a later
letter, she refers to one which belongs to this period, and which
appears to have been the first of the series. She meets her old adorer
again at the age of thirty and writes to a friend who knew of the
youthful episode. He had the same powerful eye, calm wisdom, refined
observation and "the imposing _maniere d'etre_ which anywhere would
give him influence among men"; but in herself, she says, "There is
scarcely a fibre left of the haughty, passionate, ambitious child he
remembered and loved."

Though a precocious girl and in a way fascinating, there is evidence
that Margaret was crude and unformed socially, due perhaps to the
habit of considering her mother as a negligible quantity. Cambridge
ladies preserved an unpleasant portrait of the child as she appeared
at a grand reception given by Mr. Fuller to President Adams in 1826,
"one of the most elaborate affairs of the kind," says Col. Higginson,
"that had occurred in Cambridge since the ante-revolutionary days of
the Lechmeres and Vassals." Margaret ought to have been dressed by an
artist, but apparently, a girl of sixteen, she was left to her own
devices. She appeared, we are told, with a low-necked dress badly cut,
tightly laced, her arms held back as if pinioned, her hair curled all
over her head, and she danced quadrilles very badly. This escapade was
not allowed to repeat itself. Certain kind and motherly Cambridge
ladies took the neglected child in hand, tamed her rude strength, and
subdued her manners. Col. Higginson mentions half a dozen of these
excellent ladies, among them his mother, at whose feet "this studious,
self-conscious, overgrown girl" would sit, "covering her hands with
kisses and treasuring every word."

Chief among Margaret's motherly friends was Mrs. Eliza Farrar, wife of
a Harvard professor, an authoress of merit, "of uncommon character and
cultivation, who had lived much in Europe, and who, with no children
of her own," became a kind of foster-mother to Margaret. She had
Margaret "constantly at her own house, reformed her hairdresser,
instructed her dres