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Another incident that heightened the strain was when Miss Stein told Picasso his poetry was no good. "Well he said getting truculent, you yourself always said I was an extraordinary person well then an extraordinary person can do anything, ah I said catching him by the lapels of his coat and shaking him, you are extraordinary within your limits but your limits are extraordinarily there and I said shaking him hard, you know it, you know it as well as I know it ... but don't go on trying to make me tell you it is poetry and I shook him again, well he said supposing I do know it, what will I do, what will you do said I and I kissed him, you will go on until you are more cheerful or less dismal and then you will, yes he said, and then you will paint a very beautiful picture and then more of them, and I kissed him again, yes said he."
Her U. S. experiences were of a different order. Flying a great deal, getting $100 a lecture, writing on money for The Saturday Evening Post, Gertrude Stein seems to have enjoyed everything except a case of nerves before her first speech, a clash with Alexander Woollcott ("Miss Stein," said he, "you have not been in New York long enough to know that I am never contradicted"). Sometimes she hits a strange note of little-girl helplessness in her philosophical asides: "Really inside you if you are a genius there is nothing inside you that makes you really different to yourself inside you than those are to themselves inside them who are not a genius." But generally her remarks have a bland, oblique humor: "I always enjoyed watching a little American girl . . . who used to say she would now play her father. And that consisted in saying with a gesture I am going I am through." The high points of Everybody's Autobiography are in such incidental comments, in Gertrude Stein's discussion of her brothers and sister (Bertha "was a little simple minded so was my brother Simon . . ."), in the picture the book gives, between the lines, of Miss Stein and Miss Toklas dashing animatedly over the country, telling eminent personages what's what, patting the U. S. on the back for its friendliness, curiosity, generosity.