The retirement of the ladies to the drawing-room afforded Margaret an opportunity which she had not yet enjoyed. "I had afterward some talk with Mrs. Carlyle, whom hitherto I had only seen,--for who can speak while her husband is there? I like her very much; she is full of grace, sweetness, and talent. Her eyes are sad and charming." Margaret saw the Carlyles only once more. "They came to pass an evening with us. Unluckily, Mazzini was with us, whose society, when he was there alone, I enjoyed more than any. He is a beauteous and pure music; also, he is a dear friend of Mrs. Carlyle. But his being there gave the conversation a turn to progress and ideal subjects, and Carlyle was fluent in invectives on all our 'rose-water imbecilities.' We all felt distant from him, and Mazzini, after some vain efforts to remonstrate, became very sad. Mrs. Carlyle said to me: 'These are but opinions to Carlyle; but to Mazzini, who has given his all, and helped bring his friends to the scaffold in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of life and death.'" Clearly, Carlyle had not, in Margaret's estimation, the true gospel. She would not bow to the Titanic forces, whether met with in the romances of Sand or in his force-theory. And so, bidding him farewell with great admiration, she passes on, as she says, "more lowly, more willing to be imperfect, since Fate permits such noble creatures, after all, to be only this or that. Carlyle is only a lion." Carlyle, on his side, writes of her to Mr. Emerson:-- "Margaret is an excellent soul: in real regard with both of us here. Since she went, I have been reading some of her papers in a new Book we have got: greatly superior to all I knew before: in fact, the undeniable utterances (now first undeniable to me) of a truly heroic mind; altogether unique, so far as I know, among the writing women of this generation; rare enough, too, God knows, among the writing men. She is very narrow, sometimes, but she is truly high. Honor to Margaret, and more and more good speed to her." At a later day he sums up his impressions of her in this wise:-- "Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul. Her 'mountain me,'[B] indeed; but her courage, too, is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness _à toute épreuve_." Margaret's high estimate of Mazzini will be justified by those who knew him or knew of him:--