ive a decision upon it. The Governor ruled in favor of
Washington, who then rode back to Virginia. But he spent a week in New
York City in order to see his enchantress, Mary Philipse, and it is
even whispered that he proposed to her and that she refused him. Two
years afterwards she married Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Morris, and
during the Revolution the Morris house was Washington's headquarters;
the Morrises, who were Tories, having fled.

Persons have speculated why it was that so many of the young women
whom Washington took a fancy to, chilled and drew back when it came to
the question of marriage. One very clever writer thinks that perhaps
his nose was inordinately large in his youth, and that that repelled
them. I do not pretend to say. So far as I know, psychologists have
not yet made a sufficiently exact study of the nose as a determining
factor in matrimony, to warrant an opinion from persons who have
made no special study of the subject. The plain fact was that by his
twenty-fifth year, Washington was an unusually presentable young man,
more than six feet tall, broad-shouldered, very strong, slender and
athletic, carefully polite in his manners, a boon companion, though he
talked little, a sound and deliberate thinker; moreover, the part he
had taken in the war with the Indians and the French made him almost
a popular hero, and gave him a preeminent place among the Virginians,
both the young and the old, of that time. The possession of the
estate of Mount Vernon, which he had inherited from his half-brother,
Lawrence, assured to him more than a comfortable fortune, and yet
gossip wondered why he was not married. Thackeray intimates that
Washington was too evidently on the lookout for a rich wife, which, if
true, may account for some of the alleged rebuffs. I do not believe
this assertion, nor do I find evidence for it. Washington was always a
very careful, farseeing person, and no doubt had a clear idea of what
constitutes desirable qualifications in marriage, but I believe he
would have married a poor girl out of the workhouse if he had really
loved her. However, he was not put to that test.

One May day Washington rode off from Mount Vernon to carry despatches
to Williamsburg. He stopped at William's Ferry for dinner with his
friend Major Chamberlayne. At the table was Mrs. Daniel Parke Custis,
who, under her maiden name of Martha Dandridge, was well known
throughout that region for her beauty and sweet dispo