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