From other formal society Mrs. Washington also saved her husband, for a visitor on New Year’s tells of her setting “‘the General’ (by which title she always designated her husband)” at liberty:  “Mrs. Washington had stood by his side as the visitors arrived and were presented, and when the clock in the hall was heard striking nine, she advanced and with a complacent smile said, ’The General always retires at nine, and I usually precede him,’ upon which all arose, made their parting salutations, and withdrew.”  Nor was it only from the fatigues of formal entertaining that the wife saved her husband, Washington writing in 1793, “We remain in Philadelphia until the 10th instant.  It was my wish to have continued there longer; but as Mrs. Washington was unwilling to leave me surrounded by the malignant fever which prevailed, I could not think of hazarding her, and the Children any longer by my continuance in the City, the house in which we live being in a manner blockaded by the disorder, and was becoming every day more and more fatal; I therefore came off with them.”

Finally from these “scenes more busy, tho’ not more happy, than the tranquil enjoyment of rural life,” they returned to Mount Vernon, hoping that in the latter their “days will close.”  Not quite three years of this life brought an end to their forty years of married life.  On the night that Washington’s illness first became serious his secretary narrates that “Between 2 and 3 o’clk on Saturday morning he [Washington] awoke Mrs. Washington & told her he was very unwell, and had had an ague.  She ... would have got up to call a servant; but he would not permit her lest she should take cold.”  As a consequence of this care for her, her husband lay for nearly four hours in a chill in a cold bedroom before receiving any attention, or before even a fire was lighted.  When death came, she said, “Tis well—­All is now over—­I have no more trials to pass through—­I shall soon follow him.”  In his will he left “to my dearly beloved wife” the use of his whole property, and named her an executrix.

As a man’s views of matrimony are more or less colored by his personal experience, what Washington had to say on the institution is of interest.  As concerned himself he wrote to his nephew, “If Mrs. Washington should survive me, there is a moral certainty of my dying without issue:  and should I be the longest liver, the matter in my opinion, is hardly less certain; for while I retain the faculty of reasoning, I shall never marry a girl; and it is not probable that I should have children by a woman of an age suitable to my own, should I be disposed to enter into a second marriage.”  And in a less personal sense he wrote to Chastellux,—­