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.