spent long evenings together; and occasionally, accompanied by the delighted Miss Polly, they had gone to dinner at a restaurant and later to a concert or a play.  That he had been almost too kind it was impossible for her to deny; but she had tried her best to repay him—­she had, when one came to the point, done as much as she could to remedy the defects of his education.  At first she had given zest, sympathy, eagerness, to her self-appointed task of making him over; then, as the months went by, a sense of doubt, of discouragement, of approaching failure, had tempered her enthusiasm, and at last she had realized that her work, except in the merest details, had been ineffectual and futile.  The differences, which she had regarded as superficial, were, in reality, fundamental.  It was impossible to make him over because he was so completely himself.  He stood quite definitely for certain tendencies in democracy, and by no ingenious manipulation could she twist him about until he presented the sham appearance of moving in the opposite direction.  For the logic of her failure was perfectly simple—­he couldn’t see, however hard he tried, the things she wanted him to look at.  The difficulty was far deeper than a mere matter of finish, or even of education—­for it was, after all, not one of manner, but of material.  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.  He was truthful, he was generous, he was brave, kind, and tolerant; but his virtues, like his personality, were large, flamboyant, and without gradations of colour.  Custom had not pruned their natural luxuriance, nor had tradition toned down the violence of their contrasts.  They were experimental, not established virtues, as obviously the expression of the man himself as was his uncultivated preference for red geraniums.  For he possessed, she admitted, a sincerity such as she had not believed compatible with human designs—­certainly not with human achievement.  According to the code of the sheltered half of her sex—­according to the inflexible