The storekeeper thereupon proposed that the young lawyer should share his own room above the store. Lincoln promptly accepted, went upstairs, and in a moment was down again. With dry humor he said: "Well, Speed, I am moved."
Lincoln longed for better quarters, however, because he wanted to be married. He watched with interest the new buildings that were going up, probably reflecting sadly that none of them were for him. In his discouragement he wrote to Miss Mary Owen of New Salem, to whom he had said something about coming to live with him in Springfield:
"You would have to be poor, without the means of hiding your poverty. Do you believe you could bear that patiently? Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and contented. And there is nothing I can imagine that would make me more unhappy than to fail in the effort. I know I should be much happier with you than the way I am, provided I saw no sign of discontent in you."
Miss Owen declined to go to Springfield, because she felt that Lincoln was "deficient in those little links which make up the chain of a woman's happiness."
Five years later, on November 4, 1842, Lincoln married Miss Mary Todd, a member of a prominent Kentucky family, who had come to Springfield in 1839 to live with her sister, Mrs. Ninian W. Edwards. The house in which she spent the three years before her marriage was one of the handsomest in the town, and was a centre of social gayety. Mr. and Mrs. Edwards opposed the marriage to the poor and plebeian lawyer; they urged the folly of exchanging a cultured home for the surroundings to which Lincoln would take her. But she knew her own mind, and she went with Lincoln to the home he provided for her.
The character of the accommodations to which he took his bride is revealed by a letter written in May, 1843: "We are not keeping house, but boarding at the Globe Tavern.... Boarding only costs four dollars a week."
But the day came when the young statesman was able to open for Mrs. Lincoln the door of their own modest one-story house. Later a second story was added under the direction of his wife, most of the work being done while he was away from home, riding the circuit.
J. G. Holland's pleasing picture of life in the home during the years from 1850 to 1860 should be remembered:
"It was to him a time of rest, of reading, of social happiness, and of professional prosperity. He was already a father, and took an almost unbounded delight in his children. The most that he could say to any rebel in his household was, 'You break my heart, when you act like this.' A young man bred in Springfield speaks of a vision that has clung to his memory very vividly.... His way to school led by the lawyer's door. On almost any fair summer morning he could find Mr. Lincoln on the sidewalk in front of his house, drawing a child backward and forward, in a child's gig. Without hat or coat, and wearing a pair of rough shoes, his hands behind him holding on to the tongue of the gig, and his tall form bent forward to accommodate himself to the service, he paced up and down the walk forgetful of everything around him. The young man says he remembers wondering how so rough and plain a man should live in so respectable a house."