“I would dearly like to do as you say,” Sarah Grimke answered, “but it must not be in Philadelphia.  I cannot draw a long breath there, intellectual or moral.  Freedom to live as my conscience dictates, to give free utterance to my thoughts, to have contact with those who are pressing after progress and whose watchword is onward, is needful to me.  In Philadelphia there is an atmosphere of repression that would destroy me.  Ground to powder as I was, in the mill of bigotry and superstition, I shudder at the thought of encountering again the same suffering I went through there.  Indeed, I wonder I was not altogether stultified and dried up beyond the power of revivification, when the spring came to my darkened soul after that long, long winter....  There must be something in this wide, progressive world for me to do, but I must wait patiently to see what the future has in store for me.”

All this, from a woman in her sixty-second year, shows how fresh was still her interest in humanity, and how little her desires for usefulness and improvement were dampened by age.  But Angelina’s continued delicate health kept her from carrying out any of her plans.  She could see no way of escape consistent with duty and her devotion to the children, and she cheerfully submitted to the inevitable.  But she could never bring herself to be satisfied with the Association life.  She had had no ideal about it, no golden dreams, but joined it because she could not be separated from those she loved, and, with singular reasoning, she put one thousand dollars into it, because, if there was to be a failure and loss, she wished to share it with her sister and brother.  But she had no affinity for living together in a great hotel, and it fretted her much, also, to see Mr. and Mrs. Weld taking constantly increasing burdens upon themselves as the school increased.  Her longings, for their sake, for a little quiet home, are very pathetic.  But she never allowed her anxieties to affect her intercourse in the household; on the contrary, no one was more full of life and good humor than she.  Her favorite maxim was:  “Bravely to meet our trials is true heroism; to bear them cheerfully, an exhibition of strength and fortitude infinitely beyond trying to get rid of them.”

But it is doubtful, after all, if everything else had been favorable to it, that Sarah could have brought herself to leave Angelina and the children.  She says herself:—­

“A separation from the darling children who have brightened a few years of my lonely and sorrowful life overwhelms me when I think of it as the probable result of any change.  They seem to be the links that bind me to life, the stars that shed light on my path, the beings in whom past, present, and future enjoyments are centred, without whom existence would have no charms.”