“Welcome to the land of sunshine!” says smiling California. “If your heart is young, then stay with me and play!”
There are plenty of reasons why they liken Santa Barbara to Nice, Cannes, or Monte Carlo. When we arrived in our rooms at the Hotel Potter we could hardly believe we were not on the Riviera, not merely because of the white enamel and shadow chintz furnishings of our rooms looking out upon the palm-bordered esplanade to the ocean just beyond, but because only in Continental watering places do friends send—or could they possibly find for you—bouquets of welcome like that. Against the gray wall above the writing-table a great sheaf bouquet of the big, pale-pink roses that you associate with France, combined with silver violet thistles, gladiolii in a chromatic scale of creams and corals, and in such profusion that they were standing in a tall vase on the floor. The third bouquet was of apricot-colored roses, heliotrope and white lilies.
As a matter of fact, the Riviera bears the same resemblance to Santa Barbara that artificial flowers bear to the real. The spirit of one is essentially artificial, insidiously demoralizing. The spirit of the other is the essence of naturalness, inevitably rejuvenating.
Instead of spending your every waking moment in electric-lighted restaurants and gambling rooms, you live in the sunshine, and in the open. Every house, nearly, has its patio or open court, and no matter what your occupation may be, you seldom go indoors. Carrying the love of outdoors even to concerts and theatrical performances, the owner of a very beautiful garden has built a theater, of which the stage is a terrace of grass, and the scenery evenly planted trees. In spite of some of the pretentious villas, the keynote of the Pacific coast is still naturalness. Affectations have really no place.
One afternoon at a fruit ranch, we found ourselves next to a woman who for twenty minutes extolled the perfection of her long years of living in Italy. With her hands affectedly clasped and gazing at the feathery olive-trees, she exclaimed:
“Ah! that takes me so back to my beloved Sicily, and the mornings when I used to walk along the olive groves and eat ripe olives before breakfast.”
To offer strangers olives picked from the trees is a pet joke of Californians no less than the Italians. The uncured fruit is as bitterly uneatable as quinine.
“Oh, do you like fresh olives?” This gleefully from the host. “Let me pick you some!” In a few moments he returned with a fruit-laden branch. With bated breath, everyone watched as she plucked one and—gamely, ate it!
