Mr. Frank Shaw was furnishing them the money to build their new Phalanstery, which, when completed, burned down, and Mr. Shaw never got his money back. We met his beautiful wife as we neared the "experiment," and she asked us to her house to tea. We were sorry afterwards that we had not accepted, for the whole menage, I regret to remember, seemed very wanting in cleanliness and care.
George William and Burrill Curtis were conspicuous there, in blue blouses, like French workmen. Mr. Ripley, who sat at the head of the table, talked supremely well. He was a most striking figure, and every one was so intellectual and superior that one wished, had it been less warm and more fragrant, to stay there. Mr. Ripley, who afterwards became a very dear friend of mine in New York society, often spoke of that glimpse of mine at what had been to him a painful disappointment. He told me how badly some characters "panned out," how many illusions he lost. "It all went up in smoke," he said; and yet the theory seemed most plausible.
Margaret Fuller, who had always struck me as a very plain woman, was the oracle. She had a very long neck, which Dr. Holmes described "as either being swan-like or suggesting the great ophidian who betrayed our Mother Eve." She had a habit of craning her head forward as if her hearing were defective; but she had a set of woman-worshippers who said that the flowers faded when she did not appear.
She was the Aspasia of this great council. She seemed to have a special relationship to each of the intellectual men about her, discerning and reading them better than they did themselves. Some one said of her that she was a kind of spiritual fortune-teller, and that her eyes were
