The “quiet, humble habitation” was found at Fort Lee, on the Hudson, and there the happy trio settled down for their first housekeeping.

CHAPTER XVI.

They were scarcely settled amid their new surroundings before the sisters received a formal notice of their disownment by the Society of Friends because of Angelina’s marriage.  The notification, signed by two prominent women elders of the Society, expressed regret that Sarah and Angelina had not more highly prized their right of membership, and added an earnest desire that they might come to a sense of their real state, and manifest a disposition to condemn their deviations from the path of duty.

Angelina replied without delay that they wished the discipline of the Society to have free course with regard to them.  “It is our joy,” she wrote, “that we have committed no offence for which Christ Jesus will disown us as members of the household of faith.  If you regret that we have valued our right of membership so little, we equally regret that our Society should have adopted a discipline which has no foundation in the Bible or in reason; and we earnestly hope the time may come when the simple Gospel rule with regard to marriage, ’Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers,’ will be as conscientiously enforced as that sectarian one which prohibits the union of the Lord’s own people if their shibboleth be not exactly the same.

“We are very respectfully, in that love which knows no distinction in color, clime, or creed, your friends,

“A.E.G.  WELD.

“SARAH M. GRIMKE.”

It will be noticed that in this reply Angelina avoids the Quaker phraseology, and neither she nor Sarah ever after used it, except occasionally in correspondence with a Quaker friend.

Thus ended their connection with the Society of Friends.  From that time they never attached themselves to any religious organization, but rested contentedly in the simple religion of Christ, illustrating by every act of their daily lives how near they were to the heart of all true religion.

As I am approaching the limits prescribed for this volume, I can, in the space remaining to me, only note with any detail the chief incidents of the years which followed Angelina’s marriage.  I would like to describe at length the beautiful family life the trio created, and which disproved so clearly the current assertion that interest in public matters disqualifies woman for home duties or make these distasteful to her.  In the case of Sarah and Angelina those duties were entered upon with joy and gratitude, and with the same conscientious zeal that had characterized their public labors.  The simplicity and frugality, too, which marked all their domestic arrangements, and which neither thought it necessary to apologize for at any time, recall to one’s mind the sweet pictures of Arcadian life over which goodness, purity, and innocence presided, creating an atmosphere of perfect inward and outward peace.