The pretty daughter of a popular tavern-keeper, whose old-fashioned house was a favorite with statesmen and their wives, she had developed into womanhood under the eyes of men famous in the State. Here Jackson lived during his senatorial service, and grew fond of the vivacious child he often held on his knee. With the education a doting father lavished upon her, and with her intimate contact with men of ability and women of refinement, she found herself, on the threshold of life, the intellectual peer of the best of her sex. It is not unnatural that this clever and beautiful girl should have incurred the jealous displeasure of the less attractive spouses of the elder statesmen. Her rare beauty alone would have done that had she been as virtuous as Cæsar’s wife should have been. Perley Poore[287] describes her as of medium height, straight and delicate and of perfect proportions; with a skin of delicate white, tinged with red, and with an abundance of dark hair clustered above her broad, expressive forehead; with a nose of perfect Greek proportions, a finely curved mouth, a firm, round chin--the Aspasia of Washington. When, in addition to her physical and intellectual charms, it must be recorded that she occasionally played the rôle of barmaid, permitting such liberties as men in the early stages of their cups would take, it is easy to understand why the more sedate matrons of the little capital were prone to look upon her as beyond the pale. She had married a purser in the navy, and even her enemies at the time conceded that the match was a _mésalliance_ because of her intellectual superiority. In time the husband sailed across the sea, leaving his comely young wife in the rather free-and-easy atmosphere of her father’s tavern. The moral conditions of the capital were not such as to spare the most virtuous, thus situated, from the tongue of gossip. A contemporary has said that the Washington of those days “resembled in recklessness and extravagance the spirit of the England of the Seventeenth Century, so graphically portrayed in Thackeray’s Humorists.’ ... Laxity of morals and the coolest disregard possible, characterized that period of our existence.”[288] Living at the O’Neal tavern at the time was the wealthy Senator Eaton, who had manifested more than a passing interest in “Peggy,” as she was called, before her marriage. Gossip had it that he became more than ever attentive when the sailor went to sea. When, after a drunken debauch, which the gossips, without the slightest justification, ascribed to the worthless seaman’s knowledge of his wife’s friendship for the Senator, the husband shot himself, and Eaton was found in her company with increasing frequency, the case was complete as far as the drawing-rooms were concerned. All that evidence could not furnish, the imagination did, and pretty Peggy stood pilloried in the community.