It was not until the age of thirty-four that she experienced her first romantic love for a man, the German Jew James Nathan, whom she met during her first year in New York. When he expressed passion for her, she was deeply disturbed, even shocked, and he soon returned to Europe, partly, it is thought, to escape from her stubbornly “platonic” hold upon him. Four years later in Italy she lived for a season with the Marchesa d’Ossoli, whom she married secretly after discovering that she was pregnant, as Wollstonecraft had done in the case of Godwin. Versions of both these heterosexual experiences were permitted to survive by Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, who edited her _Memoirs_, but, says Mason Wade in a later biography, “These friends of Margaret, in their regard for her memory, inked out, scissored or pasted over a third of the never-to-be-duplicated mass of material they had before them.”[2] The first thirty-four of her fifty years were not, however, emotionally empty. At the age of thirteen she fell deeply in love with an Englishwoman visiting in Cambridge, the first member of a more cosmopolitan society than she had before encountered. When after a few months her adored departed she fell into melancholy, was unable to eat, and declined so much in health that her father packed her off to a boarding school to find companionship of her own age. She was far too precocious and self-absorbed to be popular with the girls, and her chief interest was in a sympathetic teacher with whom, as with her English idol, she afterwards corresponded for years. Family cares and financial stress after her father’s death apparently filled her late teens and early twenties to the exclusion of personal contacts, and no emotional record survives from the year when she taught in Bronson Alcott’s school. At the end of a succeeding period as headmistress of a school in Providence, however, she parted from the boys without emotion, but the girls, whose adoration had been precious to her, all wept at losing her and she wept with them. (Most of these incidents were not expurgated from her _Memoirs_.) Her next five years, between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-four, were devoted to her famous “Conversations,” hybrids between a French salon and a modern seminar. For a course of these two-hour sessions held in the homes of the participants her fee was twenty dollars, in a day when tickets to as many lyceum lectures cost only two; still her group never numbered less than thirty. Her intellectual brilliance and the magnetism she exerted upon her exclusively feminine audiences have become legendary, and it is quite evident from the various accounts of them that a strong emotional rapport with women contributed to her success. It is notable that the evening course given one winter to a mixed group which included many distinguished intellectual men was a comparative failure.