had never heard of him. Just being in a train, he found, and rushing on
to somewhere else was extraordinarily nerve-soothing. At Clark there
would be gloom and stagnation, the heavy brooding of a storm that has
burst but not moved on, a continued anger on his mother's side,
naturally increasing with her inactivity, with her impotence. He was
gone, and she could say and do nothing more to him. In a quarrel,
thought Mr. Twist, the morning he pushed up his blinds and saw the
desert at sunrise, an exquisite soft thing just being touched into faint
colours,--in a quarrel the one who goes has quite unfairly the best of
it. Beautiful new places come and laugh at him, people who don't know
him and haven't yet judged and condemned him are ready to be friendly.
He must, of course, go far enough; not stay near at hand in some
familiar place and be so lonely that he ends by being remorseful. Well,
he was going far enough. Thanks to the Annas he was going about as far
as he could go. Certainly he was having the best of it in being the one
in the quarrel who went; and he was shocked to find himself cynically
thinking, on top of that, that one should always, then, take care to be
the one who did go.

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