dards 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.

With all her woman heart Kitty had fought against these comparisons--and
continued to make them. Everything in her nature that belonged to
Granite Mountain--that was, in short, the product of that land--answered
to Phil's call, as instinctively as the life of that land calls and
answers Its mating calls. Everything that she had acquired in those
three years of a more advanced civilization denied and repulsed him. And
now her meeting with Patches had stirred the warring forces to renewed
activity, and in the distracting turmoil of her thoughts she found
herself hating the land she loved, loathing the life that appealed to
her with such insistent power, despising those whom she so dearly
esteemed and honored, and denying the affection of which she was proud
with a true woman's tender pride.

Kitty was aroused from her absorption by the shrill boyish yells of her
two younger brothers, who, catching sight of their sister from the top
of one of the low hills that edge the meadow