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.