In a way the thing seemed fated. She knew nobody else, aside from the Lontaines. She was meeting people daily, of course, but not on terms to warrant any but the most commonplace civilities: men of affairs who reasonably reckoned her a pretty nonentity and concentrated on Lontaine as the person with money to spend; now and again some minor celebrity of the cinema colony, who, if male, would find some means to let her know she wouldn't be too ill treated should she succumb, or if female, would both envy and resent her inimitable chic, and at the same time put her in a place as a mere amateur who mustn't expect too much.
When she came to look back at those days, Lucinda saw herself as one always on the go with the Lontaines and Summerlad in his spectacular motor-car: pelting headlong for some objective leagues away, Riverside for luncheon at the Mission Inn, San Diego for a week-end, Santa Barbara for the drive along the magnificent Coastal Highway, or any other of two-score remote play-grounds; going out of an evening to one of the local restaurants, Victor Hugo's for its good food and urbane service, Marcelle's for dancing and its dumbfoundering scheme of decorations, Sunset Inn for the lark of it and the people one saw, the Ship for its wild traditions, or to some lost place in the labyrinth of strange streets below South Main, to which Summerlad alone knew the way, where one might get food purely exotic in character, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese; or (and this was part of the programme of nearly every night) braving the bill-of-fare at one or another of the city theatres or their arrogant rivals, the sumptuous cinemas.
In the course of that first month Lucinda sat through more photoplays than she had ever seen before, interested even when, as all too often, they were overweeningly ambitious of intention and sorry in execution; determined to read their riddle and learn what Summerlad and Lontaine were talking about when they argued in the jargon of the studios.... But it was really the audiences that thronged these thundering temples of the silent drama that fascinated her, audiences of a texture inexplicably strange to Eastern eyes, like the street crowds from which they were drawn, so dense and constant that one was tempted to believe the people of Los Angeles never went home except to sleep.
Such torrents of motor vehicles brawled through the city channels, the only wonder was that anybody ever walked. Yet it was seldom Lucinda's fortune to view the sidewalks in the heart of town when they were not aswarm with moving masses of the most heterogeneous composition, shuffling, staring, oddly taciturn.
The great body of these seemed to be sober-sided souls in steady circumstances; a bourgeoisie smug and semi-shabby, ignorant of its past, heedless of its future, largely unconcerned with its present; self-dedicated to existences as uninteresting and useful as a cow's. Summerlad cursed it with a local aphorism to the sense that Los Angeles was governed by small-town people from the Middle West who had come to California each with one lung and one dollar and a grim determination to hang onto both to the bitter end.
Infiltrating this primary element was one alien to it but comprehending also figures that might have served for a pageant of North American history, figures many of them like old wood-cuts brought to life; red Indians, Down East Yankees, Mexicans, gaunt hillsmen from Kentucky and Tennessee, towering Texans, ranchmen from the plains, and folk in whose eyes shone the brooding abstraction of the desert; in the main ill-clothed and uncouth of gesture, hiding behind apathetic masks a certain awe and sense of awkwardness.
And then, like spume wind-torn from the crests of sullen seas, glittering with rainbow iridescence, a froth of creatures money-drunk and amusement-mad, drones lured to California by its fabled Winter climate, and an earth-born army audaciously experimenting with wings bestowed by the careless bounty of the cinema.
Against this picture of a ceaseless crush in the centre of the city, Lucinda set in contrast so sharp that it never lost its power to stir her wonder, a picture on every hand repeated off the main arteries of traffic in the radiating residential suburbs: an interminable street of broad-eaved white bungalows hugging the ground, each isolate in its unfenced plot of green, to each its vines, its flower beds, its stripling orange trees, and each and every one silent and in all seeming lifeless, cowering in the day-long glare of that vast and empty vault of blue, like a city of doll-houses which the children had outgrown....