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

was a mixing of hardening, of forcing themselves into a kind of living as if they were poor people and had no one to do things for them, with a way of being very rich, that is having everything the father ever could imagine would do any good to any one of them.
     
     This made a queer mixture in them. They found it a great trouble to them, this past education, when they first began to be young grown men and women. Later in their living they liked it that they had had such a mixing of being rich and poor, together, in them.
     
     As children they all three had loved very well this kind of living. As I was saying they had their ten acres, with a rose hedge to fence their joys in, in that part of Gossols where no other rich people were living. They had all around them, for them, poor people to know in their daily living, and from them they learned their ways which were queer ways for them who had from their father's fortune a very different kind of position to be natural to them.
     
     In Gossols the Herslands could be freer inside them than if the father had remained with his brothers where the mother had brought them and this freedom he used in the education of his children. They never knew any one of them nor the father who was directing it for them just where their learning was coming from or how it would touch them. Mr. Hersland had all kinds of ways of seeing education. He was fondest of all of the idea of hardening but this was difficult for him to keep steadfast in him with his great interest in every kind of new invention, in wanting that his children should always have anything that could do any good to any one of them.
     
     There was joy in them all in their later living that it had been Gossols where they had had their youthful feeling and later when they learned to know other young grown men and women they loved the freedom that they had inside them, that their father had in his queer way won for them.
     
     As I was saying they had ten acres where they had every kind of fruit tree that could be got there to do any growing, and they had cows and dogs and horses and hay making, and the sun in the summer dry and baking, and the wind in the autumn and in the winter the rain beating and then in the spring time the hedge of roses to fence all these joys in.
     
     The mother had always been accustomed to a well to do middle class living, to keeping a good table for her husband and the children, to dressing herself and her children in simple expensive clothing, to have the children get as presents whatever any one of them wanted to have at that time to amuse them. She was a sweet contented little woman who lived in her husband and her children, who could only know well to do middle class living, who never knew what it was her husband and her children were working out inside them and around them. She had strongly inside her the sense of being mistress of the household, the wife of a wealthy and good man and the mother of nice children. When they were little children they liked to cuddle to her when she took them out to visit the rich people who lived in the other part of Gossols. They were all bashful children, living as they did in the part of the town where no rich people were living and so being used to poor queer kind of people and only feeling really at home with them who were not people in the position that their father's fortune and large way of living would naturally make companions for them. And so as little children when they went to visit with their mother in the part of Gossols where other rich people were living, they clung to her or on the sofa where she would be sitting and talking, they climbed behind her, and then too she wore seal-skins and pleasant stuffs for children to rub against and feel as rich things to touch and have near them and so they liked to go with her, and this and the habit of being children with a mother was mostly all of the feeling that