Benito was becoming very friendly with Mariposa. He was a cheerful and expansive soul. Could they have heard him, Uncle Gam and his mother might have suffered some embarrassment on the score of his revelations as to their quarrels concerning his upbringing. Benito had thoroughly gaged the capacity of each of them in resisting his charms and urging him to higher and better things. He was already at the stage when his mother appealed slightly to his commiseration and largely to his sense of humor. Mariposa saw that while he had grasped the great fact that his Uncle Gam had an unfortunately soft heart, he also knew there was a stage when it was resolutely hardened and his most practised wiles fell baffled from its surface. They alighted from the car at what was then the main entrance, and, side by side, Benito fluently talking, made toward the gate. Here a peanut vender had artfully placed his stall, and the fumes from the roasted nuts rose gratefully to the nostrils of the small boy. He said nothing, but sniffed with an ostentatious noise, and then looked sidewise at Mariposa. One of the sources of his respect for her was that she was so quick in reading the language of the eye. One did not vulgarly have to demand things of her. He felt the nickel in his hand and galloped off to the stand, to return slowly, his head on one side, an eye investigating the contents of the opened paper bag he carried. Being a gentleman of gallant forbears, he offered this to Mariposa, listening with some uneasiness to the scraping of her fingers among its contents. He had an awful thought that she might be like Miguel, who could never be trusted to withdraw his hand until it was full to bursting. But Mariposa’s eventually emerged with one small nut between thumb and finger. This she nibbled gingerly as they passed under the odorous, dark shade of the cypresses. Benito spread a trail of shells behind him, dragging his feet in silent happiness, his eyes fixed on the brilliant prospect of sunlit green that filled in the end of the vista like a drop-curtain. As they emerged from the cypress shadows the lawns and shrubberies of the park lay before them radiantly vivid in their variegated greens. The scene suggested a picture in its motionless beauty, the sunlight sleeping on stretches of shaven turf where the peacocks strutted, the red dust of the drive unstirred by wind or wheel. Rich earth scents mingled with the perfume of the winter blossoms, delicate breaths of violets from beneath the trees, spices exhaled by belated roses still bravely blossoming in November, and now and then a whiff of the acrid, animal odor of the eucalyptus.