Page:The Ladies of the White House.djvu/174

152 days' duration. During this journey the abscess broke, and she felt so much relieved that her going to Bermuda was no longer considered necessary, and she passed that winter with her father. I believe my father was in Congress at that time. My mother's only sister, Marie Jefferson, then Mrs. John W. Eppes, was also a member of her fathers family that winter, her husband being in Congress. There was a difference of six years in the ages of the sisters; my mother, who was the oldest, had accompanied her father to France, where she was educated under his eyes. My aunt had afterward followed them to Paris under the wing of Mrs. John Adams, in whose correspondence mention is made of her. The three became thus reunited only two years before their return home, after which she (my aunt) was placed at school in Philadelphia. She grew up possessed of rare beauty and loveliness of person as well as disposition; but her health was delicate, and her natural modesty and timidity was so great as to make her averse to society. Undervaluing her own personal advantages, she regarded with the warmest admiration, as well as sisterly affection, her sister's more positive character and brilliant intellectual endowments. My mother was not a beauty; her features were less regular than her sister's, her face owing its charms more to its expressiveness, beaming as it ever was with kindness, good humor, gayety and wit. She was tall and very graceful, notwithstanding a certain degree of embonpoint. Her complexion naturally fair, her hair of a dark chestnut color, very long