her thoughts began to turn back to home. Her mother's want of
spirituality, from her standpoint, grieved her greatly. The accounts
she received of the disorder in the family added to her anxieties, and
she felt that her influence was needed to bring about harmony, and to
guide her mother on the road to Zion. She laid the case before the
Lord, and, receiving no intimation that she would be doing a wrong
thing, she decided to return to Charleston.

Before leaving Philadelphia, however, she felt that it was her duty to
assume the full Quaker dress. She had worn plain colors from the time
she began to attend meeting in her native city, but the clothes were
not fashioned after the Quaker style, and she still indulged herself in
occasionally wearing a becoming black dress; though when she did so,
she not only felt uncomfortable herself, but knew that she made many of
her friends so. "Persisting in so doing," she says, "I have since been
made sensible, manifested a want of condescension entirely unbecoming a
Christian, and one day conviction was so strong on this subject, that,
as I was dressing, I felt as if I could not proceed, but sat down with
my dress half on, and these words passed through my mind: Can it be of
any consequence in the sight of God whether I wear a black dress or
not? The evidence was clear that it was not, but that self-will was the
cause of my continuing to do it. For this I suffered much, but was at
length strengthened to cast away this idol."

Remembering the fashionable life she had once led, and her natural
taste for the beautiful in all things, it must have been something of a
sacrifice, even though sustained by her religious exaltation, to lay
aside everything pretty and becoming, and, denying herself even so much
as a flower from nature's own fields, to array herself in the scant and
sober dress of drab, the untrimmed kerchief, and the poke bonnet.