ination) which has been an annual expence to me ever since, as the
estate never raised one half the rent I was to pay. Before I left Virginia
I answered all her calls for money; and since that period have directed my
steward to do the same." Furthermore, he gave her a phaeton, and when she
complained of her want of comfort he wrote her, "My house is at your
service, and [I] would press you most sincerely and most devoutly to
accept it, but I am sure, and candor requires me to say, it will never
answer your purposes in any shape whatsoever. For in truth it may be
compared to a well resorted tavern, as scarcely any strangers who are
going from north to south, or from south to north, do not spend a day or
two at it. This would, were you to be an inhabitant of it, oblige you to
do one of 3 things: 1st, to be always dressing to appear in company; 2d,
to come into [the room] in a dishabille, or 3d to be as it were a prisoner
in your own chamber. The first you'ld not like; indeed, for a person at
your time of life it would be too fatiguing. The 2d, I should not like,
because those who resort here are, as I observed before, strangers and
people of the first distinction. And the 3d, more than probably, would not
be pleasing to either of us."

Under these circumstances it was with real indignation that Washington
learned that complaints of hers that she "never lived soe poore in all my
life" were so well known that there was a project to grant her a pension.
The pain this caused a man who always showed such intense dislike to
taking even money earned from public coffers, and who refused everything
in the nature of a gift, can easily be understood. He at once wrote a
letter to a friend in the Virginia Assembly, in which, after reciting
enough of what he had done for her to prove that she was under no
necessity of a pension,--"or, in other words, receiving charity from the
public,"--he continued, "But putting these things aside, which I could not
avoid mentioning in exculpation of a presumptive want of duty on my part;
confident I am that she has not a child that would not divide the last
sixpence to relieve her from real distress. This she has been repeatedly
assured of by me; and all of us, I am certain, would feel much hurt, at
having our mother a pensioner, while we had the means of supporting her;
but in fact she has an ample income of her own. I lament accordingly that
your letter, which conveyed the first hint of this matter,