Amazon.com description: Product Description: Excerpt: ...from time to time, as if she dreaded lest the dim portraits on the walls and the dark folios on the shelves might overhear her words. It was not one of those conversations which a third person can report minutely, unless by that miracle of clairvoyance known to the readers of stories made out of authors' brains. Yet its main character can be imparted in a much briefer space than the old black woman took to give all its details. She went far back to the time when Dudley Venner was born,