At first, Kitty had been excited, bewildered and fascinated by the glittering, sparkling, ever-changing, many-faceted life.  Then she had grown weary and homesick.  And then, as the months had passed, and she had been drawn more and more by association and environment into the world of down-to-dateism she, too, began to regard the sparkle of the diamond as the determining factor in the value of the gem.  And when the young woman had achieved this, they called her education finished, and sent her back to the land over which Granite Mountain, gray and grim and fortress-like, with its ranks of sentinel bills? keeps enduring and unchanging watch.

During those first glad days of Kitty’s homecoming she had been eagerly interested in everything.  The trivial bits of news about the small doings of her old friends had been delightful.  The home life, with its simple routine and its sweet companionship, had been restful and satisfying.  The very scenes of her girlhood had seemed to welcome her with a spirit of genuineness and steadfastness that had made her feel as one entering a safe home harbor after a long and adventurous voyage to far-away and little-known lands.  And Phil, in the virile strength of his manhood, in the simple bigness of his character, and in his enduring and unchanging love, had made her feel his likeness to the primitive land of his birth.

But when the glad excitement of those first days of her return were past, when the meetings with old friends were over and the tales of their doings exhausted, then Kitty began to realize what her education, as they called it, really meant.  The lessons of those three years were not to be erased from her life as one would erase a mistake in a problem or a misspelled word.  The tastes, habits of thought and standards of life, the acquirement of which constituted her culture, would not be denied.  It was inevitable that there should be a clash between the claims of her home life and the claims of that life to which she now felt that she also belonged.

However odious comparisons may be, they are many times inevitable.  Loyally, Kitty tried to magnify the worth of those things that in her girlhood had been the supreme things in her life, but, try as she might, they were now, in comparison with those things which her culture placed first, of trivial importance.  The virile strength and glowing health of Phil’s unspoiled manhood—­beautiful as the vigorous life of one of the wild horses from which he had his nickname—­were overshadowed, now, by the young man’s inability to clothe his splendid body in that fashion which her culture demanded.  His simple and primitive views of life—­as natural as the instinct which governs all creatures in his God-cultivated world—­were now unrefined, ignoble, inelegant.  His fine nature and unembarrassed intelligence, which found in the wealth of realities amid which he lived abundant food for his intellectual life, and which enabled him to see clearly, observe closely and think with such clean-cut directness, beside the intellectuality of those schooled in the thoughts of others, appeared as ignorance and illiteracy.  The very fineness and gentleness of his nature were now the distinguishing marks of an uncouth and awkward rustic.