THE MAKING OF AMERICANS (Family Saga). Gertrude Stein

forgetting. And it is right that they should do this for him else how would there be the right kind of marrying, how would there come to be existing the decent, honest enough, comfortable men and women that never get in the American tradition any recognition, but they are always in the world existing these decent well to do men and women with the not very lively sense in them of loving and their easy forgetting, and there are the women, they are always existing, they who have inside them strongly the right feeling of how the world was in its beginning and how it must keep on going. And so there is the right kind of marrying and decent well to do fathers and good mothers are always existing who have a decent loyal feeling of the right kind of loving and they have their children and so they keep on going and we decent respectable well to do comfortable good people are all of them. This business of marrying and loving is very different with the very young, or poor or with quite old men. With all of these loving is strong inside them, they are not so peaceable with their forgetting, they are quicker with marrying than comfortable well to do young men.

      They are many families of women and the men find some in each one of them pleasing, and then the men go drifting, doing a little loving and then a little forgetting, and then restarting, until they get so strongly the feeling of loving, if they have the right kind of helping, that they come to have so strongly in them the feeling of loving that then it is an effort for them to begin again with their forgetting, and then they are ripe for marrying, and one of the family of women has him and marrying contents them and they have the right kind of living for them and everything keeps on as it was in the beginning. It is the truth that I have been telling.

      David Hersland's sister Martha arranged his marriage for him. She was right to arrange a marriage for him. David had made enough money to support himself and a wife and children. Going to the far west was just beginning to work in him. Perhaps marrying might keep him from going, anyway it would be good for him to have a good wife to go to Gossols with him.

      Martha, David Hersland's sister who arranged his marriage for him, had been married five years to a decent good man who had settled in Bridgepoint where he was making for himself a very good living. They had two children.

      Martha was one of the two Hersland women who had done very well in marrying. She had an important feeling and this was like the father's feeling in religion, and she was like her mother in her way of keeping on strongly when she had made a beginning, and she always made a beginning whenever it was right for her to do so for her feeling. She was the best one of all of them to arrange a marriage for a brother who needed to have a good wife to go out to Gossols with him. Martha was very like her father. She was a small good enough looking woman with blue eyes and with a manner that was not very unpleasing. She was like her father because she loved to be important, but with her it was not in religion. She was different from him because she loved to be doing. She loved to be important by the doing of all the things that were right to do to her feeling. One of these things was the marrying her brother so that he would have a good wife to follow him and serve him. She thought a great deal about it and she did a good deal of talking and at last she decided to choose Fanny Hissen.

      Martha, David Hersland's sister, who always did whatever it was right for her to do, to her feeling, was not very unpleasing. In some ways she was quite pleasing, she was so to her husband, to him she was very pleasing. She was not really pleasing to her brother David Hersland, to him she was not appealing nor domineering and it took women of these two kinds to be pleasing to him, but he knew she was a good woman who would always do what was right for her to do to her feeling, and mostly he thought she was right in her feeling and in her way of doing what was right to her feeling and so he was willing that she should choose a wife to content him.

      To her husband this Martha was almost always pleasing. He was a big man with strong passion in him and a sentimental feeling and he wanted a wife, not to be domineering, but to hold him with her attraction, and always to be equal to him. He did not want a wife to appeal to him, he would not have one to domineer over him. It was his sentimental feeling that made him not want his wife to be appealing, he wanted to make her an ideal to him. He was a man to be master in his living and so he never would have a wife to domineer over him.

      Martha Hersland who was married to him was just right for him. She was the woman to hold him and this one can see from the nature of her as it will come out from her in the history of her as she makes the marriage for her brother.

      In some ways Martha was not very pleasing, she was a woman to make a beginning and to keep on going when it was right to do so, to her feeling. When she met with stronger women she would not stop herself from winning, she would not know that she was then losing she only dropped out of that working and made for herself a new beginning. She was not a strong woman, as her mother had been, the mother who was like a mountain, who had it in her to uphold around her, her man, her family, and everybody whom she saw needing directing. Martha was not in such a way a strong woman, she was not in any such way pleasing. She was like her father in her important feeling, but she was stronger than he ever had been, in keeping going, she was fonder of making a beginning, she always liked to be doing, and so she was not very pleasing, in some ways she was very pleasing.

      It is this that we must use as a beginning to understand this kind of woman, to feel what she was doing in arranging a marriage for her brother David to content him, to see what she had strongly inside her of an important feeling, to know why she had the right way of doing whatever was right to her feeling in the business of living, to know how her husband could find her so satisfying, to find out how she was pleasing.

      Martha was a good woman in doing whatever it was right for her to do, to her feeling. She was fond of doing, good at making a beginning, and almost strong enough to keep on going. It was always all right for her when there was not any strong person resisting, for then she was always strong enough to keep on going and then, though mostly, not altogether winning, she came then near enough to winning to give to her her important feeling. She would not end in any kind of winning if any other one kept up any resisting, then Martha would not know she was losing, she would begin with some other beginning and so she never could lose her important feeling. Her husband listened to her talking, he knew what she did from her telling, she was not strong to be domineering, she was strong enough not to be appealing, she was always attractive to him, she filled up his sentimental feeling, she was an ideal to him with no power to disturb him, she was always pleasing to him. As I was saying her brother did not find her pleasing but he knew she was a good woman, he felt that she was mostly right in her feeling and in her ways of doing, he was willing that she should choose a wife for him to content him and he was right to let her choose for him.

      Martha's husband had a cousin who had once worked for old Mr. Hissen. This cousin and his wife came to know them enough to see them very often. There were not many people who came to know them enough to see them very often. The old man Hissen had his wife and children shut up with him as much and as long as he could keep them. One of them, the eldest girl among them, the one that had most in her, of all of them, of religion, had already come to her marrying. A cousin from another town came to see them and she wanted him and he wanted her to take care of him, and then they made the father consent to their marrying. Perhaps he liked it better that they had no good prospects before them. Marrying should be a sorrow to them, and the mother sorrowed in them, living was all sadness and she knew that it would be so for them. Anyway they were married and they were living happily enough when the wife did not feel too strongly her importance in religion. Now that they were married the old folks did not interfere with them.

      This cousin of Martha's husband who had come to see a good deal of them tried to arrange a marriage between his brother and another of the Hissen sisters, one of the pleasantest of them. It was a good chance for her for the brother of the cousin was a very well to do man and he was a good enough man though a very stupid and a dull one. It was a good chance for one of them and this one, one of the pleasant ones of them was willing to meet him but seeing him set her off laughing and every time she saw him again she went on laughing and at last he grew angry and that was the end of her marrying. She never came again to the point of having a man want her to content him. There were a number of the Hissen women who never came to marrying. Their way of living and with no one except strangers to help them and the eldest daughter not doing very well in her marrying and being gloomy and important in religion and never very strong in pushing or doing