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

I don't forget it. Yes I come now Martha. Sure I always will do it what is right for me to do so you and the children can have it. I never do any other way in it. I go on with you now I got another look to see I don't forget it. I just stopped here to see it. Its just I wanted to see what way it looked so I would get it right not to forget it. Alright Martha I come, you go on, I be with you in a minute. I just look to see I got it fixed right so I don't forget it. Alright Martha I come now. I got it fixed now I can't forget it. Alright we go on now I done what I needed. I came back just to do it. Now we go on to the children and we go on to do it like we said we would do it.” And he sighed and he got up and he looked back as he went away from it and she talked about how much the children were going to like it and he began to forget it.
     All, the wagon and the driver and the horses and the children, had waited for them to come up to it. Now they went on again, slowly and creaking, as is the way always when a whole family do it. Moving through a country is never done very quickly when a whole family do it.
     They had not gone very far yet. They had not been going many hours. They were all having now just coming in them their first tired, the first hot sense of being very tired. This is the hardest time in a day's walking to press through and get over being tired until it comes to the last tired, that last dead tired sense that is so tired. Then you cannot press through to a new strength and to get another tired, you just keep on, that is you keep on when you have learned how you can do it, then you just get hardened to it and know there is no pressing through it, there is no way to win out beyond it, it is just a dreary dull dead tired, and you must learn to know it, and it is always and you must learn to bear it, the dull drag of being almost dead with being tired.
     In between these first and last are many little times of tired, many ways of being very tired, but never any like the first hot tired when you begin to learn how to press through it and never any like the last dead tired with no beyond ever to it.
     It was this first hot tired they all had in them now just in its beginning, and they were all in their various ways trying to press themselves to go through it, and they were mostly very good about it and not impatient or complaining. They were all now beginning with the dull tired sense of hot trudging when every step has its conscious meaning and all the movement is as if one were lifting each muscle and every part of the skin as a separate action. All the springiness had left them, it was a weary conscious moving the way it always is before one presses through it to the time of steady walking that comes when one does not any longer do it with a conscious sense with each movement. It is not until one has settled to it, the steady walk where one is not conscious of the movement, that you have become really strong to do it, and the whole family were now just coming to it, they were just pressing through their first hot tired.
     And now once more the father had done it. The father was no longer with them, once more he had slipped back and they had lost him.
     The mother said to the children. “Well you go on, I go back to get him.” She felt no anger in her toward him. She just went patiently back to find him.
     She told the children to keep on slowly as they were going and she would go back and find him. She walked back looking patiently everywhere for him. She found him before she had gotten back to where she had the last time found him. He had not gotten back yet to where be could see all he was going to leave behind him. She had walked faster than he and had caught him.
     She had no impatient feeling in her against him. It was a way he had, she knew it, it was right for him to have it, the kind of a feeling he had about leaving. It was a way he had,