Page:The Making of Americans, 1925.djvu/21
and then a young grown man and then old like a man grown old and then dead and so no more of living, it is more strange because it makes so many lives in this one living. Each one of these lives that he forgets or remembers only as a dim beginning is a whole life to us in our thinking, and so Henry Dehning has had many lives in him to our feeling.
Could one believe it that he was a grown man and he was then living like the man who comes into his place now to do a little selling to the servants in the kitchen. And yet that was one whole full life for him; and then there was the old world where there had been for him such a very different kind of living. Yes as he stands there talking to his children of the things that are never real now any more to his feeling, a man comes up the walk and slinks back when he sees them and goes sneaking to the kitchen and there he sells little things to the women who buy them out of Irish fun or just to be kind to him, for his things are really not good enough for them, they are things for people poorer than any that work in a kitchen; and so Mr. Dehning goes on talking to his children and it is all more real to their feeling than it is now to his thinking, for they have it in their fear which young ones always have inside them, and he, he has it only as a dim beginning as being like a baby or an old grown man or woman. Nay how can he ever have it in him to feel it now as really present to him, such things as meekness or poor ways or self attendance or no comforts, it is only a fear that could make such things be now as present to him, and he has no such a fear ever inside him, not for himself ever or even for his children, for he is strong in a sense of always winning. It is they, the children, who, though they too feel a strength inside them and talk about it very often, yet way down deep in them they know they have no way to be really certain; and always they are brave, good-looking, honest, prosperous children and the father feels strong pride as he looks around him.
The Dehning family was made of this father and mother and three children, Mr. Dehning was very proud of his children and proud of all the things he knew that they could teach him. There were two daughters and a son of them.
Julia Dehning was named after her grandmother, but, as her father often told her, she never looked the least bit like her and yet there was a little in her that made the old world not all lost to her, a little that made one always remember that her grandmother and her father had had always a worn old world to remember.
Yes Julia looked much like her mother. That fair good-loooking prosperous woman had stamped her image on each one of her children, and with her eldest, Julia, the stamp went deep, far deeper than just for the fair good-looking exterior.
Julia Dehning was now just eighteen and she showed in all its vigor,