She took great delight in Plutarch, which she often carried to church instead of her missal.  She read the “Candide” of Voltaire, Fenelon on the education of girls, and Locke on that of children.  During all this time her mind was troubled by those unanswerable and saddening reflections upon those recondite theological subjects which often torture such children, and which grown up people are too often so forgetful of their own childhood that they fail to sympathize with them.  She regarded with disapproval the transformation of the Devil into a serpent, and thought it cruel in God to permit it.  Referring to the time when her first communion drew near, she writes:  “I felt a sacred terror take possession of my soul.”

She became profoundly humble and inexpressibly timid.  As she grew older she learned that she was to live in a world of errors, sorrows, and sins, and the mere knowledge of their existence, by some peculiar process of her wonderful mind, seemed to be the signal for their combined attack upon her soul.  She watched her thoughts until forbidden topics were generated in her mind by the very act of watchfulness.  She then regarded herself as an accomplice with every profane image which invaded her innocent imagination.  She subjected herself to physical mortifications and austerities of a whimsical yet severe character.  She aspired to the fate of holy women of old, who had suffered martyrdom, and she finally resolved to enter a convent.  She was then eleven years old.  She was placed in such an institution ostensibly for further education, but with the intention on her part there to always remain.  It was like entering the vestibule of heaven.  She records of her first night there:  “I lifted up my eyes to the heavens; they were unclouded and serene; I imagined that I felt the presence of the Deity smiling on my sacrifice, and already offering me a reward in the consolatory peace of a celestial abode.”

She was always an acute observer and a caustic commentator, and she soon discovered that the cloister is not necessarily a celestial abode, and that its inmates do not inevitably enjoy consolatory peace.  She found feminine spite there of the same texture with that wreaked by worldly women upon each other, and she notes the cruel taunts which good, old, ugly, and learned sister Sophia received from some stupid nuns, who, she says, “were fond of exposing her defects because they did not possess her talents.”  But her devotional fervor did not abate.  She fainted under the feeling of awe in the act of her first communion, for she literally believed that her lips touched the very substance of her God, and thereafter she was long brooded over by that perfect peace which passeth understanding.