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clear of hypo since you left, even better than I was along in the fall.
The next letter, February 13, was written on the eve of
Speed's marriage.
After assurances of his desire to befriend him in everything, he suggests: “But you will always hereafter be on ground that I have never occupied, and consequently, if advise were needed, I might advise wrong.
I do fondly hope, however, that you will never again need any comfort from abroad . . . I incline to think it probable that your nerves will occasionally fail you for awhile; but once you get them firmly graded now, that trouble is over forever.
If you went through the ceremony calmly or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in any present, you are safe beyond question, and in two or three months, to say the most, will be the happiest of men.”
Meanwhile
Lincoln had been duly informed of
Speed's marriage, and on the 25th he responds:
Yours of the 16th, announcing that Miss Fanny and you are ‘no more twain, but one flesh,’ reached me this morning.
I have no way of telling how much happiness I wish you both, though I believe you both can conceive it. I feel somewhat jealous of both of you now. You will be so exclusively concerned for one another that I shall be forgotten entirely. . . I shall be very lonesome without you. How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world!
If we have no friends we have no pleasure, and if we have them we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss.
