Jefferson sighed. “I came home to find peace and there is no peace. What have I done in my past, my dear, that such hordes of admirers should descend upon me? I’ve been a very ordinary fellow. I’ve always been homely, ungainly, entirely unprepossessing. No one was more surprised than I when your mother agreed to marry me. There she was—a beautiful and gracious woman with a fortune of her own—and I a struggling young lawyer, a long-legged shide-poke of a fellow, freckled and coarse-maned as a lion, with no grace except that I could fiddle. And you know I was an unpopular president. The number of them that hated me was legion.”
“Not the good plain people. Not these people who come up here in old carts or riding raw-boned nags just to get a glimpse of Thomas Jefferson, champion of the people,” his daughter said. “Two words of yours will never die in their ears: ‘Free and Equal.’ And because you made them feel free and equal, they come to see you—in droves!”
“I haven’t slept in my own bed all summer,” complained Ann, the oldest daughter. “I’ve slept on hard pallets laid down on the floor till all my bones are worn raw.”
“The worst is the curious women—the young ones,” said Ellen. “They open our wardrobes and finger our clothes. They even open drawers and jewel boxes. We should have locks on everything, Grandfather. One girl from away down on the Eastern Shore asked me to give her my chip-straw bonnet. The one Mrs. Adams sent me last summer. She said we were all rich and her folks were terribly poor and she hadn’t a decent bonnet to get married in because they were fishermen and the run of shad had been bad this year.”
“You could have given her the bonnet, Ellen. I would have bought you another one,” said her grandfather.
And gone in debt for it, thought his daughter, with a tinge of exasperation—when he had so many debts already!
Jefferson put his arms about his granddaughters. “Soon, my dears, there will come a frost and deep snows and sleet and the roads will become difficult or impassable. Then nobody will come to see us and you will be moping around the house because you are bored and lonely.”
“Ann won’t,” declared her sister, “not if young Mister Bankhead has a horse long-legged enough to wade the drifts.”
“And you,” flashed back her sister, “will be primping and ordering all the servants and the children about in case young Mister Coolidge should decide to come riding down the road.”
“Mother says I’m too young,” sighed Ellen, “but you know, Grandfather, that fourteen isn’t terribly young. Why, mother was only seventeen when she married.”