This Is Not a Gallery in a Spanish Palace, but a Gallery in the Mission Inn at Riverside, California
To find anywhere else to stay is more than difficult. You run around to “This” one and to “That,” and then to the whole advertised list, but your own “ideal” is not among them. So either you stay on where you are, and ignore the hole in your bank account or you go quickly on to the next place; or, better yet, move out to the beautiful suburb, for which one might say Los Angeles is famous and where half of the Los Angeles fashionables live. In other words, Pasadena. Pasadena, besides having many splendid hotels,[5] is a floral park of much beauty, a little too neat, perhaps, for real allure and possibly a little over-obviously rich. But its even squares of streets are splendidly bordered with palms or pepper-trees. Here and there the center of the street is sentineled by a superb tree that you are glad the street builders had not the heart to cut down. Back of tropically verdant lawns are rows of homelike bungalows smothered in vines and there are many important and beautiful places that entirely compensate for the few crude garish ones that flaunt so much wealth and so little good taste.
The Country Club is most charming, and in it a big room so appealing in color and furnishing that you feel irresistibly like settling yourself in the corner of one of the chintz-covered sofas and staying indefinitely. Yet the same people whose own houses are so attractive will seriously take you to admire a horticultural achievement that, in its magentas and scarlets, purples and heliotrope, orange, Indian red and Paris green, lacks no element of discord except an out-of-tune German band to play among its glass globes. I don’t really remember whether I saw any glass globes or not, but the disturbed visions that come back to me are of silver globes, iron stags, sea-shell fountains amid a floral debauch.
They say that when people paint their faces they lose their eye and soon put the whole paint box on. In the same way it may be that the brilliancy of the sunshine has affected people’s sight and that they can’t perceive color discords. All through Southern California you see combinations of color that fairly set your teeth on edge. Scarlet and majenta are put together everywhere; Prussian blue next to cobalt; vermilion next to old rose, olive-green next to emerald. Not only in flowers, but in homes and in clothes.
We dined the other night in a terra-cotta room hung with crimson curtains; one woman in a turquoise-colored dress wore slippers of French blue, another carried an emerald-colored fan with a sage-green frock!
The conversation—only some of it—was as queerly assembled as the colors. A Mr. Brown, to convince me of the high moral tone of Pasadena men, told me that, in Honolulu, a chief offered a friend of his two beautiful young wives. He laid special stress on their beauty of “form” and sweetness of disposition. Also he explained carefully that they were yellow in color, not black. “But my friend explained to the chief that he was married. The chief said, ‘What difference does that make? Do you want to insult my brotherly love for you?’” But the friend “insulted” and refused the little gold-colored wives. I waited for the rest of the story but there did not seem to be any rest. So I said, “And then——?”
“Well, that was just to show you,” he answered proudly, “the high type of men we have out here on the coast.”
I put this down as I heard it, although I myself don’t see much point to it, even yet!
I am trying not to say so much about hotels any more, but there is one I must mention—particularly after the failure we had with them in Los Angeles. Wanting to see the most famous orange grove in the country, we drove to Riverside and found quite by accident the most ideal hotel imaginable—the really most lovely place that ever was! So I must tell you that the Mission Inn at Riverside is worth traveling miles to stop at; a hotel of pure delight, in which the beauty of a Spanish palace and the picturesqueness of an old mission is combined with the most perfect modern comfort and at fair and reasonable rates. I don’t believe anyone ever entered its hospitable doors without pleasure or left them without regret.