animating prospect of possessing Mrs. Custis, when--I need not tell you,
guess yourself. Should not my own Honor and country's welfare be the
excitement? 'Tis true I profess myself a votary of love. I acknowledge
that a lady is in the case, and further I confess that this lady is known
to you. Yes, Madame, as well as she is to one who is too sensible of her
charms to deny the Power whose influence he feels and must ever submit to.
I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand
tender passages that I could wish to obliterate, till I am bid to revive
them. But experience, alas! sadly reminds me how impossible this is, and
evinces an opinion which I have long entertained that there is a Destiny
which has the control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest
efforts of Human Nature. You have drawn me, dear Madame, or rather I have
drawn myself, into an honest confession of a simple Fact. Misconstrue not
my meaning; doubt it not, nor expose it. The world has no business to know
the object of my Love, declared in this manner to you, when I want to
conceal it. One thing above all things in this world I wish to know, and
only one person of your acquaintance can solve me that, or guess my
meaning."


The love-affair thus alluded to had begun in March, 1758, when ill health
had taken Washington to Williamsburg to consult physicians, thinking,
indeed, of himself as a doomed man. In this trip he met Mrs. Martha
(Dandridge) Custis, widow of Daniel Parke Custis, one of the wealthiest
planters of the colony. She was at this time twenty-six years of age, or
Washington's senior by nine months, and had been a widow but seven, yet in
spite of this fact, and of his own expected "decay," he pressed his
love-making with an impetuosity akin to that with which he had urged his
suit of Miss Philipse, and (widows being proverbial) with better success.
The invalid had left Mount Vernon on March 5, and by April 1 he was back