Another story is to the effect that one morning Nelly Custis, Miss Dandridge and some other girls who were visiting Nelly came down to breakfast dressed dishabille and with their hair done up in curl papers. Mrs. Washington did not rebuke them and the meal proceeded normally until the announcement was made that some French officers of rank and young Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, who was interested in Miss Custis, had driven up outside, whereupon the foolish virgins sprang up to leave the room in order to make more conventional toilets. But Mrs. Washington forbade their doing so, declaring that what was good enough for General Washington was good enough for any guest of his. She spoiled George Washington Custis as she had his father, but was more severe with Eleanor or Nelly. Washington bought the girl a fine imported harpsichord, which cost a thousand dollars and which is still to be seen at Mount Vernon, and the grandmother made Nelly practise upon it four or five hours a day. "The poor girl," relates her brother, "would play and cry, and cry and play, for long hours, under the immediate eye of her grandmother." For no shirking was allowed. The truth would seem to be that Lady Washington was more severe with the young--always excepting Jacky and George--than was her husband. He would often watch their games with evident enjoyment and would encourage them to continue their amusements and not to regard him. He was the confidant of their hopes and fears and even amid tremendous cares of state found time to give advice about their love affairs. For he was a very human man, after all, by no means the marble statue sculptured by some historians. Yet no doubt Mrs. Washington's severity proceeded from a sense of duty and the fitness of things rather than from any harshness of heart. The little old lady who wrote: "Kiss Marie. I send her two handkerchiefs to wipe her nose," could not have been so very terrible! She was beloved by her servants and when she left Mount Vernon for New York in 1789 young Robert Lewis reported that "numbers of these poor wretches seemed most affected, my aunt equally so." At Alexandria she stopped at Doctor Stuart's, the home of two of her grandchildren, and next morning there was another affecting scene, such as Lewis never again wished to witness--"the family in tears--the children a-bawling--& everything in the most lamentable situation." Although she was not the paragon that some writers have pictured, she was a splendid home-loving American woman, brave in heart and helpful to her husband, neither a drone nor a drudge--in the true Scriptural sense a worthy woman who sought wool and flax and worked willingly with her hands. As such her price was far beyond rubies.