e soft air patting their faces, could possibly bother them
here. They never, for instance, could be cold here, or go hungry. A
great confidence in life invaded them. The Delloggs, sun-soaked and
orange-fed for years in this place, couldn't but be gentle too, and kind
and calm. Impossible not to get a sort of refulgence oneself, they
thought, living here, and absorb it and give it out again. They pictured
the Delloggs as bland pillars of light coming forward effulgently to
greet them, and bathing them in the beams of their hospitality. And the
feeling of responsibility and anxiety that had never left Anna-Rose
since she last saw Aunt Alice dropped off her in this place, and she
felt that sun and oranges, backed by L200 in the bank, would be
difficult things for misfortune to get at.

As for Mr. Twist, he was even more entranced than the twins as he gazed
out of the window, for being older he had had time to see more ugly
things, had got more used to them and to taking them as principally
making up life. He stared at what he saw, and thought with wonder of his
mother's drawing-room at Clark, of its gloomy, velvet-upholstered
discomforts, of the cold mist creeping round the house, and of that
last scene in it, with her black figure in the middle of it, tall and
thin and shaking with bitterness. He had certainly been in that
drawing-room and heard her so terribly denouncing him, but it was very
difficult to believe; it seemed so exactly like a nightmare, and this
the happy normal waking up in the morning.

They all three were in the highest spirits when they got out at Los
Angeles and drove across to the Southern Pacific station--the name alone
made their hearts leap--to catch the afternoon train on to where the
Delloggs lived, and their spirits were the kind one can imagine in
released souls on their first arriving in paradise,--high, yet subdued;
happy, but reverential; a sort of rollicking awe. They were subdued, in
fact, by beauty. And the journey along the edge of the Pacific to
Acapulco, where the Delloggs lived, encouraged and developed this kind
of spirits, for the sun began to set, and, as the train ran for miles
close to the water with nothing but a strip of sand between it and the
surf, they saw their first Pacific sunset. It happened to be even in
that land of wonderful sunsets an unusually wonderful one, and none of
the three had ever seen anything in the least like it. They could but
sit silent and stare. The