Sage met a young Italian nobleman, Prince Ranieri di San Faustino, in Rome around 1923 and fell in love with him, believing at first, as she wrote to a friend in 1924, that he was ""me" in another form." They married on March 30, 1925. For ten years the couple lived the idle life of upper-class Italians, which Sage later described as "a stagnant swamp." She looked back on that time as years that she simply "threw away to the crows. No reason, no purpose, nothing." Her husband was content with their lifestyle, but Sage was not: as she wrote in her autobiography, "China Eggs," "Some sort of inner sense in me was reserving my potentialities for something better and more constructive."