So well did she fill her position as Madam Hancock that she won golden opinions from the many distinguished men and women who came together under Hancock's hospitable roof-tree; her husband noting with ever increasing pride that his Dolly was more deeply and truly an American woman in her flowering than ever he could have dreamed she would become when he fell in love with her on that Sunday in June. And loyally did he give to her credit for such inspiration as helped to mold him into the man who received the greatest honors in the power of the colonists to bestow.
With the later life of Dorothy Hancock we are not concerned; our rose had bloomed. It matters not to us that Madam Hancock was one of the most notable women of the Revolution, who had known and talked with George Washington, that she and Martha Washington had actually discussed their husbands together. To Dorothy's great pride Mrs. Washington had spoken enthusiastically of Hancock's high position, while at that time her husband was but a general. Then, too, pretty Madam Hancock had known the noble Lafayette--had met in intimate surroundings all those great and patriotic men who had devoted their best endeavors to the establishment of a free and independent America. All that is no concern of ours in this brief story of the girl, Dorothy, nor is it ours to mourn with the mother over the death or her two children, nor ours to wonder why, three years after the death of her beloved husband, a man who had made his mark in the history of his country, she should have married again.
Ours only it is to admire Hancock's Dolly as we see her in her girlish beauty, as we follow her through the black days of fear and of tension preceding the outbreak of that war in which her lover played such a prominent part; ours to enjoy her charming manner and sparkling wit, and to respect with deep admiring a brave girl of the Massachusetts colony who watched a great nation in its birth-throes, and whose name is written in history not alone as Madam Hancock, but as Dorothy Quincy, the girl who saw the first gun fired for Independence.
An inspiration and an example for the girls of to-day, at a time when all good Americans are united in a firm determination to make the world safe for democracy.