Page:The Making of Americans, 1925.djvu/15

they have had a strong father who knew how to do it so that youngsters could so have it.

Yes, they say it long and often and yet it is never real to them while they are thus talking. No it is not as really present to their thinking as it is to the young ones who never really had the feeling. These have it through their fear, which makes it for them a really present feeling. The old ones have not such a fear and they have it all only like a dim beginning, like the being as babies or as children or as grown old men and women.

And this father Dehning was always very full of such talking. He had made everything for himself and for his children. He was a good and honest man was Henry Dehning. He was strong and rich and good tempered and respected and he showed it in his look, that look that makes young people think older ones are very aged, and he loved to tell it over to his children, how he had made it all for them so they could have it and not have to work to make it different.

"Yes," he would often say to his children, looking at them with that sharp, side-long, shrewd glance that makes fathers so fearful and so aged to their children. Not that he, Dehning, was ever very dreadful to his children, but there is a burr in a man’s voice that always makes for terror in his children and there is a sharp, narrow, outward, shut off glance from an old man that will always fill with dread young grown men and women. No it is only by long equal living that their wives know that there is no terror in them, but the young never can be equal enough with them to really rid themselves of such feeling. No, they only really can get rid of such a feeling when they have found in an old man a complete pathetic falling away into a hapless failing. But mostly for all children and young grown men and women there is much terror in an old man’s looking.

Not, we repeat, that the Dehnings had much of such a feeling. Their mother had learnt, by perhaps more than equal living that there really was no terror in him and through her they had lost much of such feeling. But always they had something of that dread in them when he would begin talking to them of what had been and what he had done for them. Then it was that he always became very aged to them and he would strongly hold them with his sharp narrow outward kind of looking that, closing him, went very straight into them.

"Yes," he would often say to his children, "Yes I say to you children, you have an easy time of it nowadays doing nothing. Well! What! yes, you think you always have to have everything you can ever think of wanting. Well I guess yes, you have to have your horses and your teachers and your music and your tutors and all kinds of modern improvements and you can’t ever do things for yourself, you always have to have somebody there to do it for you; well, yes you children