I could see that Clem exhaled a deep breath.

How long he had held it I know not.
We resumed our seats, and the dinner went forward with my hostess again herself.

It was a dinner not heavy but choice, a repast upon which Clem had magically worked all his spells.

There was a bass that had nosed the river's current that morning, two pullets cut off in the very dawn of adolescence, and a mysteriously perfect pastry whose secret I had never been able to wring from him beyond the uninforming and obvious enough data that it contained "some sugah an' a little spicin's." Having for my luncheon that day suffered an up-to-date dinner at Budds's, I felt a genuine craving for food; yet the spell of my hostess was such that I left her table ahungered.
Again there was an inexplicable reference from her to the timber and sawed-lumber interests of the Little Country, and the circumstance that another black wind seemed to shiver the eyelids of Clem lent no light to the mystery of it.

But then, as if some recondite duty to me had been safely performed, she talked to me of herself, of days when the youth of the Old Dominion had been covetous of her smiles, of nightly triumphs in ball and rout, of gay seasons at the nation's capital, amid the fashion and beauty and wit of Pierce's administration and of Buchanan's, of rounds of calls made in her calash, of bewitching gowns she had worn, of theatres and musicales and teas and embassy receptions, in a day when Harriet Lane was mistress of the White House.
For my pleasing she laughed her sprightly way through memories of that romantic past, when she danced and chattered in the fulness of her bellehood, bringing out a multitude of treasured mementoes, compliments she had compelled, witticisms she had prompted, pranks she had played, delectable repasts she had eaten at Lady Napier's or another's, the splendor of pageants she had witnessed.