Page:The Making of Americans, 1925.djvu/20

he always sang as he came to find her, never content long out of sight of his family when not engrossed by business or cards.

I said that Henry Dehning's wife was proud of such very different things, but that was wrong, she was proud in very different fashion but proud of the same things. She loved his success and the worth with which he conquered and she was not anxious to forget the way that he had come. No she was in her way proud that he himself had done it. She liked his power, and when she ever thought about it she liked the honest way she knew that he had done it. And like him too she was very proud in their three educated children but to her thinking there was very little they could teach her. She knew it all always very well and much better than they could ever know it. But she was very proud of these educated children and she was very proud of her husband Henry Dehning though she knew he always did little things so badly and that he would still always play like a poor man with his fingers and he never would learn not to doit. Yes she was very proud of her husband though he always did little things so badly and she had always to be telling him how a man in his position should know how to do it. She came towards him now when he was through with his talking, and she had one rebuke to him for his always calling her his girl Miss Jenny, and another for the way he had of fidgeting always with his fingers. "Don't do that Henry!," she said to him loudly.

Mrs. Dehning was the quintessence of loud-voiced good-looking prosperity. She was a fair heavy woman, well-looking and firmly compacted and hitting the ground as she walked with the same hard jerk with which she rebuked her husband for his sins. Yes Mrs. Dehning was a woman whose rasping insensibility to gentle courtesy deserved the prejudice one cherished against her, but she was a woman, to do her justice, generous and honest, one whom one might like better the more one saw her less.

Yes it was now all very different for them. It was very pleasant always for Henry Dehning then, to stand and to look about him, yes truly it was now all very different with him. He had his family there about him, a family certain to be a satisfaction to him, They were a group to gratify the feeling of pride in him, they were so prosperous vigorous good-looking, honest, and always respectful to him, and surely they would have later, good hope of winning for themselves all that he could ever wish to them.

Yes it certainly was very different now with him. Could one ever have it real to him that in one life time a man could have it all so different for him, that a man all alone in his single lifetime could make it so that he could have it to be truly all so different in him.

Nay for a man to have it in a single life time all so different for him is more strange than being born and being then a baby and then a child