Her new friends did not talk religion to her--that would at once have repelled her,--they lived religion. Their lives were obviously the fruit of an unseen deep root. Amalie asked no questions, she but basked in this sunny atmosphere of light and life, from which she felt it impossible to tear herself away. She rented a small country-place, known as Angelmodde, in the neighborhood of Münster; and now at length the days of real education had begun. To her own children, Mimi and Mitri, were added Amalie von Schmettau, who afterward became a nun in Vienna; George, a son of the celebrated Jakobi; and the Droste-Vischerings, one of whom became dean, the other bishop of Münster. The Princess, in her anxious search after truth and goodness, had lost none of her old sprightliness and charm. Her society to the end was eagerly courted by all the best and most distinguished men of her time. But, strange to say, even yet Amalie continued to believe she was attracted to Fürstenberg and her new friends in spite of, rather than because of, their religion. "I could not," she once wrote, "blind myself to the great views and principles of Herr von Fürstenberg; but I felt I must forgive him his Christianity on the score of early education and prejudice. I had started my friendship by frankly asking him kindly not to convert me, as in all that concerned Almighty God I could stand no meddling; that I did not fail to pray to Him for light, and at the same time kept my heart open to receive it." Hence even then there could be no question of definite dogmatic Christian teaching in the education of her own and her adopted children. Later she mourned that her want of faith had deprived the children's earlier years of the blessed knowledge of Christ. Once, when speaking of a family singularly fortunate in the way the sons had turned out, she unhesitatingly ascribed it to their early training in piety and devotion; adding that what she had obtained only through infinite pains and labor, these Christian parents had effected with comparatively little or no trouble. But a practical difficulty now arose. What were the children, no longer little children, to be taught about religion? It was the very last subject she would entrust to the teaching of a stranger; yet what did she herself know or believe about it? But at length she solved the vexed problem by resolving to teach them "historical Christianity," as she called it, leaving them free to choose their own religion as they grew up. But even for this she had to qualify herself, and with her usual whole-heartedness she threw herself into a most careful and conscientious study of the Bible, especially of the New Testament.