Such “winterings” became the regular custom, and brief references in various letters serve to illustrate them.  Thus, in 1779, Washington informed a friend that “Mrs. Washington, according to custom marched home when the campaign was about to open;” in July, 1782, he noted that his wife “sets out this day for Mount Vernon,” and later in the same year he wrote, “as I despair of seeing my home this Winter, I have sent for Mrs. Washington;” and finally, in a letter he draughted for his wife, he made her describe herself as “a kind of perambulator, during eight or nine years of the war.”

Another pleasant glimpse during these stormy years is the couple, during a brief stay in Philadelphia, being entertained almost to death, described as follows by Franklin’s daughter in a letter to her father:  “I have lately been several times abroad with the General and Mrs. Washington.  He always inquires after you in the most affectionate manner, and speaks of you highly.  We danced at Mrs. Powell’s your birthday, or night I should say, in company together, and he told me it was the anniversary of his marriage; it was just twenty years that night” Again there was junketing in Philadelphia after the surrender at Yorktown, and one bit of this is shadowed in a line from Washington to Robert Morris, telling the latter that “Mrs. Washington, myself and family, will have the honor of dining with you in the way proposed, to-morrow, being Christmas day.”

With the retirement to Mount Vernon at the close of the war, little more companionship was obtained, for, as already stated, Washington could only describe his home henceforth as a “well resorted tavern,” and two years after his return he entered in his diary, “Dined with only Mrs. Washington which I believe is the first instance of it since my retirement from public life.”

Even this was only a furlough, for in six years they were both in public life again.  Mrs. Washington was inclined to sulk over the necessary restraints of official life, writing to a friend, “Mrs. Sins will give you a better account of the fashions than I can—­I live a very dull life hear and know nothing that passes in the town—­I never goe to any public place—­indeed I think I am more like a State prisoner than anything else; there is certain bounds set for me which I must not depart from—­and as I cannot doe as I like, I am obstinate and stay at home a great deal.”

[Illustration:  MRS. DANIEL PARKE CUSTIS, LATER MRS. WASHINGTON]

None the less she did her duties well, and in these “Lady Washington” was more at home, for, according to Thacher, she combined “in an uncommon degree, great dignity of manner with most pleasing affability,” though possessing “no striking marks of beauty,” and there is no doubt that she lightened Washington’s shoulders of social demands materially.  At the receptions of Mrs. Washington, which were held every Friday evening, so a contemporary states, “the President did not consider himself as visited.  On these occasions he appeared as a private gentleman, with neither hat nor sword, conversing without restraint.”