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.
As has been remarked before, no brilliant sayings from her lips have been transmitted to posterity.

But I suspect that the shivering soldiers on the bleak hillsides at Valley Forge found more comfort in the warm socks she knitted than they could have in the _bon mots_ of a Madame de Stael or in the grace of a Josephine and that her homely interest in their welfare tied their hearts closer to their Leader and their Country.
It is not merely because she was the wife of the Hero of the Revolution and the first President of the Republic that she is the most revered of all American women..