But the desert has a peculiarly exhilarating air.  It came in everywhere, and seemed to tickle him out of the uneasy mood proper to one who has been cutting himself off for good and all from his early home.  For the life of him he couldn’t help feeling extraordinarily light and free.  Edith—­yes, there was Edith, but some day he would make up to Edith for everything.  There was no helping her now:  she was fast bound in misery and iron, and didn’t even seem to know it.  So would he have been, he supposed, if he had never left home at all.  As it was, it was bound to come, this upheaval.  Just the mere fact of inevitable growth would have burst the bands sooner or later.  There oughtn’t, of course, to have been any bands; or, there being bands, he ought long ago to have burst them.

He pulled his kind slack mouth firmly together and looked determined.  Long ago, repeated Mr. Twist, shaking his head at his own weak past.  Well, it was done at last, and never again—­never, never again, he said to himself, sniffing in through his open window the cold air of the desert at sunrise.

By that route, the Santa Fe, it is not till two or three hours before you get to the end of the journey that summer meets you.  It is waiting for you at a place called San Bernardino.  There is no trace of it before.  Up to then you are still in October; and then you get to the top of the pass, and with a burst it is June,—­brilliant, windless, orange-scented.

The twins and Mr. Twist were in the restaurant-car lunching when the miracle happened.  Suddenly the door opened and in came summer, with a great warm breath of roses.  In a moment the car was invaded by the scent of flowers and fruit and of something else strange and new and very aromatic.  The electric fans were set twirling, the black waiters began to perspire, the passengers called for cold things to eat, and the twins pulled off their knitted caps and jerseys.

From that point on to the end of the line in Los Angeles the twins could only conclude they were in heaven.  It was the light that did it, the extraordinary glow of radiance.  Of course there were orchards after orchards of orange trees covered with fruit, white houses smothered in flowers, gardens overrun with roses, tall groups of eucalyptus trees giving an impression of elegant nakedness, long lines of pepper trees with frail fern-like branches, and these things continued for the rest of the way; but they would have been as nothing without that beautiful, great bland light.  The twins had had their hot summers in Pomerania, and their July days in England, but had not yet seen anything like this.  Here was summer without sultriness, without gnats, mosquitoes, threatening thunderstorms, or anything to spoil it; it was summer as it might be in the Elysian fields, perfectly clear, and calm, and radiant.  When the train stopped they could see how not a breath of wind stirred the dust on the quiet white roads, and the leaves of the magnolia trees