In back was a cleared space that spread out into great meadows of stunted oaks no higher than a man's waist, great levels glistening green in the summer and brilliantly red in the autumn stretching away under vast skies, and always here and there was a great tree waving in the wind and wading knee deep in the rough radiant leafy tide.
     Yes the Dehnings in the country were simple pleasant people. There they were a contented joyous household. All day the young ones played and bathed and rode and then the family altogether would sail and fish. Yes the Dehnings in the country were simple pleasant people. The Dehning country house was very pleasant too for all young men and boys, the uncles and the cousins of the Dehning family, who all delighted in the friendly freedom of this country home, rare in those days among this kind of people, and so the Dehning house was always full of youth and kindly ways and sport and all altogether there they all always lead a pleasant family life.
     The Dehning family itself was made up of the parents and three children. They made a group very satisfying to the eye, prosperous and handsome.
     Mr. Dehning was a man successful, strong-featured, gentle tempered, joyous and carrying always his fifty years of life with the good-nature of a cheerful boy. He enjoyed the success that he could boast that he had won, he loved the struggle in which he had always been and always conquered, he was proud of his past and of his present worth, he was proud in his three children and proud that they could teach him things he did not know, he was proud of his wife who was proud of such very different things. “Oh Miss Jenny, she is the best girl I know,” he always sang as he came to find her, never content long out of sight of his family when not engrossed by business or cards.
     I said that Henry Dehning's wife was proud of such very different things, but that was wrong, she was proud in very different fashion but proud of the same things. She loved his success and the worth with which he conquered and she was not anxious to forget the way that he had come. No she was in her way proud that he himself had done it. She liked his power, and when she ever thought about it she liked the honest way she knew that he had done it. And like him too she was very proud in their three educated children but to her thinking there was very little they could teach her. She knew it all always very well and much better than they could ever know it. But she was very proud of these educated children and she was very proud of her husband Henry Dehning though she knew he always did little things so badly and that he would still always play like a poor man with his fingers and he never would learn not to do it. Yes she was very proud of her husband though he always did little things so badly and she had always to be telling him how a man in his position should know how to do it. She came towards him now when he was through with his talking, and she had one rebuke to him for his always calling her his girl Miss Jenny, and another for the way he had of fidgeting always with his fingers. “Don't do that Henry!,” she said to him loudly.
     Mrs. Dehning was the quintessence of loud-voiced good-looking prosperity. She was a fair heavy woman, well-looking and firmly compacted and hitting the ground as she walked with the same hard jerk with which she rebuked her husband for his sins. Yes Mrs. Dehning was a woman whose rasping insensibility to gentle courtesy deserved the prejudice one cherished against her, but she was a woman, to do her justice, generous and honest, one whom one might like better the more one saw her less.
     Yes it was now all very different for them. It was very pleasant always for Henry Dehning then, to stand and to look about him, yes truly it was now all very different with him. He had his family there about him, a family certain to be a satisfaction to him.