gh life I have been in no bondage, either real or imaginary, from
the thraldom of which I so much desired to be free.... After I had
delayed the matter as long as I thought I could in honor do (which, by
the way, had brought me round into last fall), I concluded I might as
well bring it to a consummation without further delay, and so I mustered
my resolution and made the proposal to her direct; but, shocking to
relate, she answered, No. At first I supposed she did it through an
affectation of modesty, which I thought but ill became her under the
peculiar circumstances of her case, but on my renewal of the charge I
found she repelled it with greater firmness than before. I tried it
again and again, but with the same success, or rather with the same want
of success. I finally was forced to give it up, at which I very
unexpectedly found myself mortified almost beyond endurance. I was
mortified, it seemed to me, in a hundred different ways. My vanity was
deeply wounded by the reflection that I had so long been too stupid to
discover her intentions, and at the same time never doubting that I
understood them perfectly; and also that she, whom I had taught myself
to believe nobody else would have, had actually rejected me with all my
fancied greatness. And, to cap the whole, I then for the first time
began to suspect that I was really a little in love with her."

The serious side of this letter is undoubtedly genuine and candid, while
the somewhat over-exaggeration of the comic side points as clearly that
he had not fully recovered from the mental suffering he had undergone
in the long conflict between doubt and duty. From the beginning, the
match-making zeal of the sister had placed the parties in a false
position, produced embarrassment, and created distrust. A different
beginning might have resulted in a very different outcome, for Lincoln,
while objecting to her corpulency, acknowledges that in both feature and
intellect she was as attractive as any woman he had ever met; and Miss
Owens's letters, written after his death, state that her principal
objection lay in the fact that his training had been different from
hers, and that "Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which
make up the chain of a woman's happiness." She adds: "The last message I
ever received from him was about a year after we parted in Illinois.
Mrs. Able visited Kentucky, and he said to her in Springfield, 'Tell
your sister that I think she was a