Washington's relationship with Powel was perhaps the closest of all his friendships with women in his later life, and they enjoyed a mutual respect as intellectual equals. In November 1792, Washington confided in Powel that he intended to step down at the end of his first term as president. In her own words, her "mind was thrown into a train of reflections", and she considered it "inconsistent with [their] friendship" to withhold her thoughts. To urge Washington to reconsider, she wrote a long letter using both her own words, and borrowed passages from "The Secret History of the Court of Berlin", a political treatise written by the French nobleman Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau. Her letter reads in part: