Notwithstanding these trying spiritual exercises, the summer seems to have passed in more peace than she had dared to hope for.  Israel Morris was a truly good man, with a strong, genial nature, which must have had a soothing effect upon Sarah’s troubled spirit.  But before many months 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.

Writing from Greenhill in October, she says: 

“On last Fifth Day I changed my dress for the more plain one of the Quakers, not because I think making my clothes in their peculiar manner makes me any better, but because I believe it was laid upon me, seeing that my natural will revolted from the idea of assuming this garb.  I trust I have made this change in a right spirit, and with a single eye to my dear Redeemer.  It was accompanied by a feeling of much peace.”