The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress by Gertrude Stein Read Free Book Online Page B

think hard the way you like to have me do it about what we both have said about it.”
     It was a well meant intention this in Julia of riding by herself around the country and thinking hard about what they had both said about it, but not the certain way to end in a passionate young woman her first intense emotion. The wide and glowing meadows of low oaks, the clean clear tingling autumn air, the blaze of color in the bits of woods, the freedom and the rush of rapid motion on the open road, the joy of living in a vital world, the ecstasy of loving and of love, the intensity of feeling in the ardent young, it surely was not so that Julia Dehning could win the sober reason that should judge of men.
     And always every day it came and always every day when it was ending it would be the same. “Yes I certainly do care for him and I do know him. And he and I will live our lives together always learning things and doing things, good things the}' will be for us whatever other people may think or say.”
     And so at last, filled full with faith and hope and fine new joy she went back to her busy city life, strong in the passion of her eager young imagining.
     The home the rich and self made merchant makes to hold his family and himself is always like the city where his fortune has been made. In London it is like that rich and endless dark and gloomy place, in Paris it is filled with pleasant toys, cheery and light and made of gilded decoration and white paint, and in Bridgepoint it was neither gloomy nor yet joyous but like a large and splendid canvas completely painted over but painted full of empty space.
     The Dehning city house was of this sort. A nervous restlessness of luxury was through it all. Often the father would complain of the unreasoning extravagance to which his family was addicted but these upbraidings had not much result for the rebuke came from conviction and not from any habit of his own.
     It was good solid riches in the Dehning house, a parlor full of ornate marbles placed on yellow onyx stands, chairs gold and white of various size and shape, a delicate blue silk brocaded covering on the walls and a ceiling painted pink with angels and cupids all about, a dining room all dark and gold, a living room all rich and gold and red with built-in-couches, glass-covered book-cases and paintings of well washed peasants of the German school, and large and dressed up bedrooms all light and blue and white. (All this was twenty years ago in the dark age, you know, before the passion for the simple line and the toned burlap on the wall and wooden panelling all classic and severe.) Marbles and bronzes and crystal chandeliers and gas logs finished out each room. And always everywhere there were complicated ways to wash, and dressing tables filled full of brushes, sponges, instruments, and ways to make one clean, and to help out all the special doctors in their work.
     It was good riches in this house and here it was that Julia Dehning dreamed of other worlds and here each day she grew more firm in her resolve for that free wide and cultured life to which for her young Hersland had the key.
     At last it was agreed that these two young people should become engaged, but not be married for a year to come, and if nothing new had then turned up, the father said he would then no longer interfere. And so the marriage now was made for with these kind of people an engagement always meant a marriage excepting only for the gravest cause. And Alfred Hersland and Julia had this time to learn each other's natures and prepare themselves for the event.
     When the twelve months had passed away no grave cause had come to make a reason why this marriage should not be. Julia was twelve months older now, and wiser, and through this wisdom had in general a little more distrusting in her, but never in any kind of a way was she changing about the new world she needed now to content