POLITICS would soon seek him again, but for the moment Lee could rest from the labors of his third completed year as head of Washington College. Long visits from relatives and friends were a constant backdrop to his life in Lexington—indeed, this past winter yet another Mildred Lee, the daughter of his brother Carter, had lived with him, and her two brothers were at the college—and he particularly enjoyed it when children were among the guests in the crowded house. Little girls had always been his favorites, and he had come to expect a delighted response to his teasing and compliments. Now, to his real annoyance, it appeared that his charm was to have its first failure. A neighbor chronicled the mounting crisis and its resolution.
He took a great deal of notice of a little girl whose mother was a friend of one of his daughters and was visiting at his house. All his advances, however, were steadily repulsed by the child. Some weeks passed, and he had not succeeded in winning a smile or kiss from her, when one morning she passed his study door and pausing before it, was invited to come in.
She did not do so, but stood and glanced around the room. Suddenly spying a figure of a man in a costume of a century back made of pasteboard and stuffed, and very showily dressed hanging on the wall—it was meant for a pen wiper, and was hung over his table by some of his zealous lady friends—she looked at it, and then at him, and advancing a few steps toward him, asked, “Is that your doll baby?”
“Yes,” he said. His possession of a doll baby seemed at once to establish a feeling of fellowship with him and going to him at once she sat on his lap, and was always his devoted friend.
By mid-July, the family was ready for the leisurely progression that was to end at the White Sulphur Springs. The start was proving to be so leisurely that, even though there was a large carriage waiting at the door to take the family on the first leg of their journey, the ladies of the family were so far from being ready that Lee had time to write a letter to a great young favorite of his. This was Charlotte Haxall, who had visited her close friend Mildred in Lexington this past spring. Lee was writing now in the hope that Charlotte might come to join them at the White Sulphur as company for Mildred, and his old gallantry was in full flower. “My beautiful Lottie,” he began, “if I were to attempt to tell you how sad your departure made us, how much we have missed you, and how depressed Lexington has since been, time and my ability would equally fail.”
Lee had correctly discerned that Custis was destined to remain a bachelor, but he missed no opportunity to bring Rob to the attention of Virginia’s fairest ladies. Before Charlotte’s spring visit, he had playfully written to her about his hardworking farmer son, “May I bring up Robert as your principal escort?” He had added that Rob would have to have his life insured if he did come with her to Lexington, because “he may be murdered by the disappointed”—the Washington College students and V.M.I. cadets who wanted her to themselves.
As Lee wrote Charlotte Haxall now, he had no idea that this time he was really on the right track, and that this was the girl whom Rob would eventually marry, although he would not be alive to see it happen. Lee gave her this picture of the departure from Lexington: Mildred was “flying about this morning with great activity.” Agnes, who had been sick, “is following with slower steps.” Mrs. Lee was giving last minute “injunctions” to Sam and Eliza, the black yard man and cook. As for Letitia, Mrs. Lee’s maid, who was accompanying them to the resorts, she was “looking on with wonder at the preparations, and trying to get a right conception of the place to which she is going, which she seems to think is something between a steel-trap and a spring-gun.”
A Lexington widower, Dr. Howard Barton, was an admirer of Mildred’s, and his appearance at this moment produced in Lee the usual negative reaction concerning suitors for his daughters. “To add interest to the scene, Dr. Barton has arrived to bid adieu and to give Mildred an opportunity of looking her best. I believe he is the last rose of summer. The others, with all their fragrance and thorns, have all departed.”
The cheery confusion of leaving was soon followed by serious illness, not for Lee, not for Mary, but for Mildred. The family had progressed only to the first resort, the Warm Springs forty miles to the northwest, when Mildred was stricken with typhoid fever. This frequently fatal disease had killed Mildred’s sister Anne Carter Lee during the war. Lee became Mildred’s chief nurse. To Rooney, who quickly sent a get-well letter to his sister, Lee replied, “I am writing in Mildred’s room, who is very grateful for your interest in her behalf. She is too weak to speak.” Here was another battle, against disease this time, and Lee was an experienced nurse. As a boy, the youngest child, it had fallen his lot to nurse his mother when she became an invalid, and the pattern had repeated itself as he nursed Mary through years of increasing invalidism.
In her delirium, Mildred insisted that she could not sleep unless her father held her hand. She did not want him to leave the room. Lee had a cot set up in the corner of Mildred’s little room upstairs in their cottage at the Warm Springs. Every night, as the music from the dance in the ballroom came across the lawns and through the trees, Lee sat by Mildred’s bed, patting her hand and wiping the sweat from her fevered face. Only when she fell into her restless sleep would Lee stretch out on his cot, ready to respond when she woke again.
This went on for a month. Mildred’s hair fell out. Finally, she was pronounced convalescent; instantly, Lee’s spirits rose. Writing to E. C. Gordon, he said of some mutual friends, “Tell Misses Maria and Nettie, that I am greatly alarmed about their sister E. There is a young Presbyterian clergyman just arrived, has taken his seat by her at table. He may do so at other times too—she would not tell me.”
With Mildred able to travel, the family moved on to the Hot Springs. Here Lee left Mildred with her mother and Agnes, going on by himself to the White Sulphur for what was by now a rest from his vacation.