... having been breathed out

Rejecting her sinful past could not preserve her from the danger of backsliding in the future, however. [Her companion] Sylvia [Drake]’s presence beside her every evening in bed over the next forty years presented temptations that were too powerful to overcome. Like many sinners who had been reborn, Charity [Bryant] struggled with her besetting sins for the rest of her days. In the final decade of her life, Charity wrote Sylvia a poem that described her private challenge. A person, she wrote, must fight:

… the secret cherished sin
The poison serpent’s tooth
The treacherous clam that lurks within
Destroying age + youth.

[…] The secret sin, in the language of the time, was a common euphemism for masturbation. Martin Luther himself had once called masturbation the secret sin. In the early nineteenth century, this corrupt practice or secret vice because an obsession within the American medical establishment. Leading doctors argued that masturbation was the primary cause of disease among American youth, leading to consumption, blindness, insanity, and even death. Notably, a close reading of anti-masturbation texts reveals that what early nineteenth-century doctors called masturbation among girls, we might call lesbian sex today. The secret vice, according to the authorities, was a sin that girls taught to each other and frequently practiced together for maximum titillation.

—Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

This is legitimately fascinating, and for my money this chapter dealing with Charity and Sylvia’s combination of Puritanical sexual guilt—they both accused themselves of sinfulness outside the common run of things—and genuine happy tenderness and sensuality toward one another, is one of the best and meatiest so far in this book…

… but I have to admit that I pretty much copied out this passage for the phrase the treacherous clam that lurks within I MEAN COME ON