THE WIFE OF BENEDICT ARNOLD. 207 than Mrs. Arnold ; " I've been playing the hypocrite, and I'm tired of it." Colonel Burr was also an old friend of herself and the Shippen family. He had been an inmate of her father's house. Feeling herself at liberty to speak freely at last, Mrs. Arnold avowed her deception of General Washing- ton,, who had even given her an escort of horse from West Point. She further confessed that she had been aware of the whole progress of the plot, and that it was she who had induced her husband to betray his country. She passed the night at Mrs. Prevost's house, being care- ful, when strangers entered the room, to resume the piteous and distracted bearing which had already served her so well. Many have doubted the truth of this incident because it rests upon the word of Aaron Burr. But Burr, what- ever his faults, was by no means the man to invent a lie which could be of no service to himself or any one else, for the mere pleasure of telling it. His story is but too probable. False, frivolous, and ambitious, she naturally desired, after the taste of distinction she had enjoyed during the days of the British occupation, followed by the bitter ordeal of her husband's disgrace in the eyes of her own Philadelphians, to escape to the brilliant social life of England. Upon reaching Philadelphia, where she wished to reside for a while with her family, the authorities refused to allow her to remain, although she protested her patriotism, promised to write no letters to her husband until after the war, and to send all received from him at once to the government. She was forced to go to New York, where, after a period of suitable dejection, she again entered society and shone as brilliantly as ever. Her life in England, when at length she was enabled to rejoin her husband there, can scarcely have been
