in the boardinghouse the justices were staying in, dislocating his shoulder and suffering a mild concussion. As he recovered, he wrote a sweet letter to Polly. “Old men”—Marshall was sixty-eight—“do not get over sprains and hurts quite as quickly as young ones.” He had, he went on, plenty of time on his hands as he recovered, which he spent recalling the episodes of their courtship, over forty years ago: “our little tiffs and makings up.… the lock of hair… all the thousand indescribable but deeply affecting instances of your affection or coldness which constituted for a time the happiness or misery of my life.” They could “never be lost while recollection remains.”
Richard Brookhiser in John Marshall