She was not only beautiful.

She had been tutored in schools that were not taught by wilderness missioners.

In her, it seemed to him, he had seen the beauty and the wild freedom of the forests as they had come to him straight out of the heart of an ancient aristocracy that was born nearly two hundred years ago in the old cities of Quebec and Montreal.
His mind flashed back at that thought: he remembered the time when he had sought out every nook and cranny of that ancient town of Quebec, and had stood over graves two centuries old, and deep in his soul had envied the dead the lives they had lived.

He had always thought of Quebec as a rare old bit of time-yellowed lace among cities--the heart of the New World as it had once been, still beating, still whispering of its one-time power, still living in the memory of its mellowed romance, its almost forgotten tragedies--a ghost that lived, that still beat back defiantly the destroying modernism that would desecrate its sacred things.

And it pleased him to think of Marette Radisson as the spirit of it, wandering north, and still farther north--even as the spirits of the profaned dead had risen from the Landing to go farther on.
And feeling that the way had at last been made easy for him, Kent smiled out into the glorious day and whispered softly, as if she were standing there, listening to him: "If I had lived--I would have called you--my Quebec.