Day by day she had realized more clearly that the problem confronting them was one which involved their different standards of living and their individual philosophies.

The things which she regarded as essential were to him only the accidental variations of life.

He had lived so long in touch with the basic realities--with vast spaces and the stark aspect of desert horizons, with droughts, and winds, and the unquenchable pangs of thirst and hunger, with the vital issues of birth and death in their most primitive forms--he had lived so long in touch with the simplest and most elemental forces of Nature, that his spirit, as well as his vision, had adjusted itself to a trackless and limitless field of view.

No, what he was now he must remain, since to change him, except in trivial details, was out of her power.
And of course he had his virtues--she would have been the last to deny him his virtues.

Whenever she applied the touchstone of character, she realized how little alloy there was in the pure gold of his nature.