and into a knowledge of woman’s part in the life to which she belonged, as naturally as her girlish form had put on the graces of young womanhood.  The things that filled the days of her father and mother, and the days of her neighbors and friends, had filled her days.  The things that were all in all to those she loved had been all in all to her.  And always, through those years, from her earliest childhood to her young womanhood, there was Phil, her playmate, schoolmate, protector, hero, slave.  That Phil should be her boy sweetheart and young man lover had seemed as natural to Kitty as her relation to her parents.  There had never been anyone else but Phil.  There never could be—­she was sure, in those days—­anyone else.

In Kitty’s heart that afternoon, as she rode, so indifferent to the life that called from every bush and tree and grassy hill and distant mountain, there was sweet regret, deep and sincere, for those years that were now, to her, so irrevocably gone.  Kitty did not know how impossible it was for her to ever wholly escape the things that belonged to her childhood and youth.  Those things of her girlhood, out of which her heart and soul had been fashioned, were as interwoven in the fabric of her being as the vitality, strength and purity of the clean, wholesome, outdoor life of those same years were wrought into the glowing health and vigor and beauty of her physical womanhood.

And then had come those other years—­the maturing, ripening years—­when, from the simple, primitive and enduring elements of life, she had gone to live amid complex, cultivated and largely fanciful standards and values.  In that land of Kitty’s birth a man is measured by the measure of his manhood; a woman is ranked by the quality of her womanhood.  Strength and courage, sincerity, honesty, usefulness—­these were the prime essentials of the man life that Kitty had, in those years of her girlhood, known; and these, too, in their feminine expressions, were the essentials of the woman life.  But from these the young woman had gone to be educated in a world where other things are of first importance.  She had gone to be taught that these are not the essential elements of manhood and womanhood.  Or, at least, if she was not to be deliberately so taught, these things would be so ignored and neglected and overlooked in her training, that the effect on her character would be the same.  In that new world she was to learn that men and women are not to be measured by the standards of manhood and womanhood—­that they were to be rated, not for strength, but for culture; not for courage, but for intellectual cleverness; not for sincerity, but for manners; not for honesty, but for success; not for usefulness, but for social position, which is most often determined by the degree of uselessness.  It was as though the handler of gems were to attach no value whatever to the weight of the diamond itself, but to fix the worth of the stone wholly by the cutting and polish that the crystal might receive.