There is no doubt that this want of proper training was to her a cause of regret during her whole life.  With her, learning was always a passion; and, in passing, I may say she never thought herself too old for study and the acquisition of knowledge.  As she grew up, and saw the very different education her brothers were receiving, her ambition and independence were fired, and she longed to share their advantages.  But in vain she entreated permission to do so.  The only answer she received was:  “You are a girl; what do you want of Latin and Greek and philosophy?  You can never use them.”  And when it was discovered that 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 amusements; but it was made in self-will, and did not stand long, though I was so earnest that I gave away much of my finery.  I cannot look back to those years without a blush of shame, a feeling of anguish at the utter perversion of the ends of my being.  But for my tutelary god, my idolized brother, my young, passionate nature, stimulated by that love of admiration which carries many a high and noble soul down the stream of folly to the whirlpool of an unhallowed marriage, I had rushed into this lifelong misery.  Happily for me, this butterfly life did not last long.  My ardent nature had another channel opened for it, through which it rushed with its usual impetuosity.  I was converted, and turned over to doing good.”