ars advanced, under her
mother's wise companionship and careful teaching, she had grown into her
share of the household duties 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 he