with Mary Philipse, of New York, daughter of Frederick Philipse, one
of the richest landowners in that Colony, and sister-in-law of Beverly
Robinson, one of Washington's Virginian friends. Washington was going
to Boston on a characteristic errand. One of the minor officers in
the Regular British Army, which had accompanied Braddock to Virginia,
refused to take orders from Washington, and officers of higher grade
in Virginia Troops, declaring that their commissions were assigned
only by Colonial officials, whereas he had his own from King George.
This led, of course, to insubordination and frequent quarrels. To
put a stop to the wrangling, Washington journeyed to Boston, to have
Governor Shirley, the Commander-in-Chief of the King's Forces in the
Colonies, give a decision upon it. The Governor ruled in favor of
Washington, who then rode back to Virginia. But he spent a week in New
York City in order to see his enchantress, Mary Philipse, and it is
even whispered that he proposed to her and that she refused him. Two
years afterwards she married Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Morris, and
during the Revolution the Morris house was Washington's headquarters;
the Morrises, who were Tories, having fled.

Persons have speculated why it was that so many of the young women
whom Washington took a fancy to, chilled and drew back when it came to
the question of marriage. One very clever writer thinks that perhaps
his nose was inordinately large in his youth, and that that repelled
them. I do not pretend to say. So far as I know, psychologists have
not yet made a sufficiently exact study of the nose as a determining
factor in matrimony, to warrant an opinion from persons who have
made no special study of the subject. The plain fact was that by his
twenty-fifth year, Washington was an unusually presentable young man,
more than six feet tall, broad-shouldered, very strong, slender and
athletic, carefully polite in his manners, a boon companion, though he