she was secretly studying law, and was ambitious to stand side by side
with her brother at the bar, smiles and sneers rebuked her "unwomanly"
aspirations. And though she argued the point with much spirit, unable
to see why the mere fact of being a girl should confine her to the
necessity of being a "doll, a coquette, a fashionable fool," she failed
to secure a single adherent to her strong-minded ideas. Her nature thus
denied its proper nutriment, and her most earnest desires crushed, she
sought relief in another direction. Painting, poetry, general reading
occupied her leisure time, while she was receiving private tuition from
the best masters in Charleston.

At sixteen she was introduced into society, or, as she phrases it,
"initiated into the circles of dissipation and folly." In her account
of the life she led in those circles she does not spare herself.

"I believe," she writes, "for the short space I was exhibited on this
theatre, few have exceeded me in extravagance of every kind, and in the
sinful indulgence of pride and vanity, sentiments which, however, were
strongly mingled with a sense of their insufficiency to produce even
earthly happiness, with an eager desire for intellectual pursuits, and
a thorough contempt for the trifles I was engaged in. Often during this
period have I returned home, sick of the frivolous beings I had been
with, mortified at my own folly, and weary of the ball-room and its
gilded toys. Night after night, as I glittered now in this gay scene,
now in that, my soul has been disturbed by the query, 'Where are the
talents committed to thy charge?' But the intrusive thought would be
silenced by the approach of some companion, or a call to join the
dance, or by the presentation of the stimulating cordial, and my
remorse and my hopeless desires would be drowned for the time being.
Once, in utter disgust, I made a resolution to abstain from such