The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress by Gertrude Stein

little unimportant mother would be all lost then in between the angry father and the three big resentful children. But all this was when they were beginning to be grown young men and women. When they were still children there was not any fierceness in the house among them.
     And now to come back to the queer ways of him. As I was saying the father was a big man. He liked eating, he liked strange ways of educating his children and he was always changing, and sometimes he was very generous to them and then he would change toward them and it would be hard for them to get even little things that they needed in the position that was given to them by their father's fortune and large way of living.
     In the street in his walking, and it was then his children were a little ashamed of him, he always had his hat back on his head so that it always looked as if it were falling, and he would march on, he was a big man and loved walking, with two or three of his children following behind him or with one beside him, and he always forgetting all about them, and everybody would stop short to look at him, accustomed as they were to see him, for he had a way of tossing his head to get freedom and a way of muttering to himself in his thinking and he had always a movement of throwing his body and his shoulders from side to side as he was arguing to himself about things he wanted to be changing, and always he had the important feeling to himself inside him.
     And then as I was saying he was a big man and he was very fond of eating, he had had a brother who had died a glutton, and he liked to buy things that looked good to him, and it would always be a very big one, he never liked to undertake anything that was not large in its beginning. The only time in his life that he ever took a little thing was when he chose his wife the little gentle Fanny Hissen who as I have often been saying could only be sad not angry when any bad thing happened to them, but yet she had a fierce little temper in her that could be very stubborn when it was well roused inside her and she sometimes had such a sharp angry feeling at some of the ways her husband had of doing, mostly when it concerned his not giving things she thought they needed to the children. But mostly they lived very well together the father and mother and three children, that is when they were young children, later it was harder for them when the father would get his very angry feeling and the mother was a little ailing and the fierce little temper broke into weakness and helplessness inside her and the three big struggling young grown men and women were seeking each one his own freedom and his own beginning. But now as children it was just the little uncomfortable feeling of being ashamed of the queer ways he had of doing that his children had to endure with him, then he was joyous and it was mostly pleasant enough living with him, and the mother was gentle and pleasant then with them and strong enough to support her little temper that could be very stubborn whenever it arose against him.
     But even when he was not doing really queer things there was always a marked character about him. It came from inside him, from the strong ways he had of beginning, from the important feeling he had always inside him from his continual thinking and in a different way from that in which all the other people around about him were thinking, and this thinking somehow marked him even when he was just simply walking and then stopping to talk with somebody or just stopping to ask a question of some stranger or to talk about the weather or other just ordinary enough talking, the kind of thing anybody could be saying, and yet the power of being free inside him made him a marked man even then, and nobody could take him to be an ordinary person or ever forget him.
     As he would be walking along with a child beside him or several of them behind him, he would stop and sweep the prospect