eration would be
performed. I mentioned the hour of eleven. He said 'Very well; do you
wish me for any other purpose, or may I lie down and go to sleep?' I was
a good deal surprised at this question, but told him that if he could
sleep it would be very desirable. He immediately placed himself upon the
bed and fell into a profound sleep, and continued so until I was obliged
to rouse him in order to undergo the operation. He exhibited the same
fortitude, scarcely uttering a murmur throughout the whole procedure
which, from the nature of his complaint, was necessarily tedious."

The death of his wife on Christmas Day of the same year was a heavy
blow. Despite her invalidism, she was a woman of much force of character
and many graces of mind, to which Marshall rendered touching tribute in
a quaint eulogy composed for one of his sons on the first anniversary of
her death:

"Her judgment was so sound and so safe that I have often relied upon it
in situations of some perplexity.... Though serious as well as gentle
in her deportment, she possessed a good deal of chaste, delicate, and
playful wit, and if she permitted herself to indulge this talent, told
her little story with grace, and could mimic very successfully the
peculiarities of the person who was its subject. She had a fine taste
for belle-lettre reading.... This quality, by improving her talents
for conversation, contributed not inconsiderably to make her a most
desirable and agreeable companion. It beguiled many of those winter
evenings during which her protracted ill health and her feeble nervous
system confined us entirely to each other. I shall never cease to look
back on them with deep interest and regret.... She felt deeply the
distress of others, and indulged the feeling liberally on objects she
believed to be meritorious.... She was a firm believer in the faith
inculcated by the Church in which she was bred, but her soft and gentle
temper was incapable of adopting the gloomy and austere dogmas which
some of its professors have sought to engraft on it."

Marshall believed women were the intellectual equals of men, because
he was convinced that they possessed in a high degree "those qualities
which make up the sum of human happiness and transform the domestic
fireside into an elysium," and not because he thought they could compete
on even terms in the usual activities of men.

Despite these "buffetings of fate," the Chief Justice was back in
Washington in att