stand
with you."

A little puzzled, I stood up to face her, as Clem pulled back her chair.
One hand on the table, the other reaching her slender stemmed glass
aloft, she leaned toward me with a look of singular vehemence.

"To our murdered brothers and husbands and sons, Mr. Blake! To our lost
leaders and our deathless lost cause! To Jefferson Davis and Robert
Edmund Lee! To the Confederate States of America!"

A black wind seemed to blow across the face of her servitor's fluttering
eyelids. But I drank loyally to Mrs. Caroline Lansdale and whatsoever
that woman would. 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 pagean