The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress Read Online Free PDF

family is the marrying of Julia. I have said that a strong family likeness bound all the three children firmly to their mother. That fair good-looking prosperous woman had stamped her image on each one of her children, but with only the eldest Julia was the stamp deep, deeper than for the fair good-looking exterior.
     All the family had always looked up to Julia. They delighted in her daring and in a kind of heroical sweetness there was in her. They respected in her, her educated ways and her knowing always what was the right way she and all of them should be doing. It was not for nothing she was a crude domineering virgin. And she was strong in the success she knew always that she had inside her, and the family always admired and followed after.
     Her father loved her energy and vigor, he loved her happiness and the ardent honest feeling in her. He was always very ready to yield to her, he liked to hear her when she explained to him in her quick decisive manner the new faith she had so strongly in her, the new illusions and the theories and new movements that the spirit of her generation had taught to her. And he laughed at her new fangled notions and her educated literary business and all her modern kinds of improvements as he called them, and he abused them and too the way she had of believing that she knew more than her mother, but always it amused the father to have his bright quick daughter explain all these new ways to him. Mr. Dehning knew well the value of what he had learned by living, but his was a nature generous in its feeling and he was always ready to listen to his children when they could fairly demonstrate their ideas to him.
     But Herman Dehning's pride and pleasure in his Julia was all exceeded by the loud voiced satisfaction of the mother to whom this brilliant daughter always seemed as the product of the mother's own exertions. In her it was the vanity and exultation of creation as well as of possession and she never fairly learned how completely it was the girl who governed all the family life and how very much of this young life was hidden from her knowledge.
     Mr. Dehning had never concerned himself very much with the management of the family's way of living and the social life of his wife and children. These things were all always arranged by Mrs. Dehning and he was well content to let her do it though he often grumbled at the foolishness and the expense and at his children always having everything they ever wanted and so being sure to be always good for nothing.
     But always he was very proud of his wife and of his children, though, a little, he always felt it was not right, their new fangled ways of doing, and yet, truly, he was very proud of them always, and indeed they were a group to gratify the pride that he had in him, they were so vigorous prosperous and good-looking, and honest, and always respectful to him, and surely they had good hope of later winning for themselves all the happiness and success he could wish them.
     Julia Dehning at eighteen had lived through much of the experience that can prepare a girl for womanhood and marriage.
     I have said, there were a number of young men and boys connected with the Dehning family, uncles and cousins, generous decent considerate fellows, frank and honest in their friendships, and simple in the fashion of the elder Dehning. With this kindred Julia had always lived as with the members of one family. These men did not supply for her the training and experience that helps to clear the way for an impetuous woman through a world of passions, they only made a sane and moral back-ground on which she in her later life could learn to lean.
     With any member of this kindred there would be, in a young and ardent mind, no thought of love or marriage; nor were the sober business men, young, old, or middle-aged, who came a great deal to the house, attractive to her temper, for Julia was ambitious for