Page:The Ladies of the White House.djvu/58

44 died of consumption a short time afterward, and thus was the wife and mother deprived of her companion, whose affection was in keeping with his many virtues and elevated mind, and the boy whose existence had first called into being all the deathless love of a mother.

Time soothed the wounds naught else could heal, and the young widow discharged the duties that belonged to her position. The trust her husband reposed in her— in leaving their large property in her own hands to control—she amply vindicated, and her estate was one of the best managed in the county. When she met Colonel Washington she was twenty-six years of age, and was remarkably youthful in appearance and very handsome. She had ever been the object of warm and disinterested affection, and from her first entrance into the society of Williamsburg, down to the last hour of her life, it was eminently illustrated. Few had been her sorrows, and for each and every one endured she could count a twofold blessing. There was nothing in her life to foster the faults incident to human nature, for the rank weeds of poverty and lack of opportunity, which cramp and deform so many earth-lives, were unfelt and unknown to her.

Mount Vernon was the gift to Colonel Washington from his elder and bachelor brother Lawrence, and the estate was then one of the finest in Virginia. Washington had made it his occasional residence before his marriage, but it was not until he took his bride there that it became his permanent home. The life that Mrs.