with evident feeling that the little show, now set up to rival the performances at Versailles and the Court of St. James, came off fairly well.
One feels this new self-consciousness of his with almost pathetic poignancy in his notes on the success of his Tuesday levees and of Mrs. Washington's Friday teas. He is particularly sensitive about the "Fridays." One day: "The visitors to Mrs. Washington were respectable, both of gentlemen and ladies"; another day, "not numerous, but respectable"; another, "rainy and bad; no one but the Vice-President." On the 29th of December, 1789: "Being very snowing, not a single person appeared at the Levee"; but on the following New Year's Day, thank goodness, "all the respectable citizens" turned out, and the Federal Union once more seemed secure.
When one considers what George Washington had been through without turning a hair—such things as having two horses shot under him and his clothes riddled with bullets in a single battle, and when one considers the events in which he participated without leaving a word of them in his daily record, one is almost justified in guessing that the very deeps of his nature must have been troubled on those Fridays when he set down for everlasting remembrance the reason why the attendance at Mrs. Washington's tea was light.
The two of them liked it superficially when there was a big gathering of "respectable" persons, but inwardly I think they both hated the officializing of their social intercourse, and were unspeakably happy, when the second heavy term was over, to be back again in the easy casual coming to and fro of their Virginia kinsmen and neighbors.
I have been dwelling on what, as it seems to us,
