In the capital’s social whirl during legislative sessions, Mary Todd was a belle. Young men liked her wit and older men her cultivation. She was “the very creature of excitement,” a Springfielder reported in 1840; she “never enjoys herself more than when in society and surrounded by a company of merry friends.” One such friend was Joshua Speed, who brought Lincoln along to events at the Edwards home. Lincoln began seeing Mary in the winter of 1839–1840. According to a relative of Ninian Edwards, Lincoln admired her “naturally fine mind and cultivated tastes,” for she was “a great reader and possessed of a remarkably retentive memory,” was “quick at repartee and when the occasion seemed to require it was sarcastic and severe.” Her “brilliant conversation, often embellished with apt quotations,” made her “much sought after by the young people of the town.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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