his proposals, and gave her heart two years later to Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Morris.  A curious sequel to this disappointment was the accident that made the Roger Morris house Washington’s head-quarters in 1776, both Morris and his wife being fugitive Tories.  Again Washington was a chance visitor in 1790, when, as part of a picnic, he “dined on a dinner provided by Mr. Marriner at the House lately Colo.  Roger Morris, but confiscated and in the occupation of a common Farmer.”

[Illustration:  MARY PHILIPSE]

It has been asserted that Washington loved the wife of his friend George William Fairfax, but the evidence has not been produced.  On the contrary, though the two corresponded, it was in a purely platonic fashion, very different from the strain of lovers, and that the correspondence implied nothing is to be found in the fact that he and Sally Carlyle (another Fairfax daughter) also wrote each other quite as frequently and on the same friendly footing; indeed, Washington evidently classed them in the same category, when he stated that “I have wrote to my two female correspondents.”  Thus the claim seems due, like many another of Washington’s mythical love-affairs, rather to the desire of descendants to link their family “to a star” than to more substantial basis.  Washington did, indeed, write to Sally Fairfax from the frontier, “I should think our time more agreeably spent, believe me, in playing a part in Cato, with the company you mention, and myself doubly happy in being the Juba to such a Marcia, as you must make,” but private theatricals then no more than now implied “passionate love.”  What is more, Mrs. Fairfax was at this very time teasing him about another woman, and to her hints Washington replied,—­

“If you allow that any honor can be derived from my opposition ... you destroy the merit of it entirely in me by attributing my anxiety to the animating prospect of possessing Mrs. Custis, when—­I need not tell you, guess yourself.  Should not my own Honor and country’s welfare be the excitement?  ’Tis true I profess myself a votary of love.  I acknowledge that a lady is in the case, and further I confess that this lady is known to you.  Yes, Madame, as well as she is to one who is too sensible of her charms to deny the Power whose influence he feels and must ever submit to.  I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand tender passages that I could wish to obliterate, till I am bid to revive them.  But experience, alas! sadly reminds me how impossible this is, and evinces an opinion which I have long entertained that there is a Destiny which has the control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of Human Nature.  You have drawn me, dear Madame, or rather I have drawn myself, into an honest confession of a simple Fact.  Misconstrue not my meaning; doubt it not, nor expose it.  The world has no business to know the object of my Love, declared in this manner to you, when I want to conceal it.  One thing above all things in this world I wish to know, and only one person of your acquaintance can solve me that, or guess my meaning.”