"Ought we?" Lucinda doubted with a little grimace.
"Why not?" Fanny asked.
"It seems just a bit.... Oh, I don't know. I presume it would be ungracious to question Californian hospitality."
"Copy-Californian," Fanny corrected. "Chances are you'll find Summerlad's a native son of Omaha or some point East. Does it matter? He means well, and we want to see Los Angeles."
"But that car!"
"It is rather a circus-wagon; but judging by what we've seen in the streets today, the way to make oneself conspicuous here is to sport a car of gaudy black or screaming navy blue. In the racy idiom of the Golden West—let's go."
They went. In ten minutes Los Angeles of the sky-scrapers was forgotten. For three hours league after league of garden-land, groves, plantations, ocean beach, bare brown hills, verdant valleys wide as an Eastern county, all bathed in sunlight of peculiar brilliance and steadiness falling through crystalline air from a sky innocent of cloud, passed in review before beauty-stricken eyes.
In the end the car turned without warning off a main-travelled highway, swept the bluestone drive of what might well have been parked private grounds, and stopped before the imposing, columned portico of an old Colonial mansion.
The chauffeur turned back a friendly, grinning face. "This is where Mr. Summerlad works," he announced—"the Zinn Studios."
"Studios!"