Still, it was with a faint regret she prepared to complete what had been a deed of renunciation.

Montreal, with its gayeties and luxuries, had not seemed so very far away while she was carried west amid all the comforts artisans who were also artists could provide for the traveler, but once that door closed behind her she would be cut adrift from it all, and left face to face with the simple, strenuous life of the prairie.
Maud Barrington had, however, made her mind up some weeks ago, and when the lock closed with a little crack that seemed to emphasize the fact that the door was shut, she had shaken the memories from her, and was quietly prepared to look forward instead of back.

It also needed some little courage, for, as she stood with the furs fluttering about her on the lurching platform, the cold went through her like a knife, and the roofs of a little prairie town rose up above the willows the train was now crawling through.

The odors that greeted her nostrils were the reverse of pleasant, and glancing down with the faintest shiver of disgust, her eyes rested on the litter of empty cans, discarded garments, and other even more unsightly things which are usually dumped in the handiest bluff by the citizens of a springing Western town.
They have, for the most part, but little appreciation of the picturesque, and it would take a good deal to affect their health.
Then the dwarfed trees opened out, and flanked by two huge wheat elevators and a great water tank, the prairie city stood revealed.

It was crude and repellant, devoid of anything that could please the most lenient eye, for the bare frame houses rose, with their rough boarding weathered and cracked by frost and sun, hideous almost in their simplicity, from the white prairie.