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