This the Hollywood provided to admiration. Summerlad assured Lucinda, and on her own observation she could well believe, that at one stage or another of their careers almost every motion-picture player of consequence in the country must have registered at this hotel. Many continued to reside there, though no reason existed why they should not observe the custom of other happy holders of long-term contracts and move into homes of their own. Aside from such fixtures—and a non-professional element composed mainly of middle-aged folk with set incomes who had contracted the habit of spending their Winters and not much else in California—the hotel boasted a restless movement of birds of passage: stars of the legitimate stage brought on from New York to play in a single picture, lesser lights coming West at their own risk to solicit a "try-out;" playwrights and novelists with reputations in two continents declining to profit by the experience of innumerable predecessors, fatuously assuming that imagination, intelligence and honest workmanship had a dog's chance in the studios; directors enjoying their favorite pastime of hopping from Coast to Coast with everything paid; overlords of the cinema visiting the West Coast to look after their own or their rivals' fences and filch actors and directors from one another. These came and went by every trans-continental train. Remained the incurable addicts with yet another element, hardly less habitué but humbler, maintaining precarious residence in the hotel on meagre means, on remittances from home or God knew how (and, knowing, wept) hanging on desperately to hope of happier tomorrows, when they, too, would have their own cars call to take them to their daily toil, instead of trudging or trolleying from studio to studio in pursuit of the elusive day's work as an extra: a class largely feminine and insistently youthful.
With most of these Lucinda became acquainted by sight, with many she grew accustomed to exchange smiles and the time of day. They were a friendly lot, indomitably cheerful and brisk. If sheer joy of living didn't keep their eyes bright, belladonna did; their hand-painted smiles were unfailing; their slender, silken legs twinkled in vivacious by-play on veranda steps and in the public rooms; by every sign they were ever on the wing and jolly glad. Lucinda liked them all involuntarily, and wished them well; and when she came to know some of them better her heart ached for them.
This was inevitable. The most glacial reserve must have melted to the warmth of such gayly casual overtures. It was good business to know Miss Linda Lee, and they made it their business without undue delay. She had not been twenty-four hours a sister-guest before all these young things knew an astonishing lot about her that wasn't so, and a deal that was.
Lucinda was a raw tenderfoot who was going to finance her own company, a prominent stage favorite trying her luck under an assumed name, a Baltimore society beauty with the motion-picture bee in her bonnet, nobody at all except the dear friend of this or that nationally known man, who was paying to put her into pictures to get rid of her. It didn't matter who or what she was, more than what was irrefutably established: that she was Linda Lee, she had simply sloughs of coin, she was to star in her own productions, Barry Nolan had been engaged to direct her, Lynn Summerlad had gone nutty about her; all of which summed up to this, that Lucinda was in a position to utter words of power whose fruit might be days and days of work at ten or fifteen per—who knew?—perhaps the miracle of a steady job!
They made up to her saucily or shyly, according to the style they believed became them best, with assurance or with humility, with ostensible indifference, and some in open desperation. But on one point they were all agreed: they wanted work. Lucinda spoke about two or three of them to Lontaine, who laughed and advised her to recommend them to Barry Nolan's assistant, when that far day dawned on which the question of casting subordinate rôles would be in order. She spoke to Lynn Summerlad, and was rewarded with a worried frown, the first sign of care she had ever detected in him, together with some well-chosen thoughts on the dangers of contracting haphazard hotel acquaintanceships. Lucinda explained that she hadn't sought them, they had been practically forced upon her; she could see no merit in being rude and "upstage." Summerlad retorted darkly that one never could tell; the motion-picture colony harboured any number of queer birds; it wouldn't do for her of all women to pick up with a wrong one.
"First thing you know, they'll be trying to borrow money from you."
Lucinda was silent for want of a conscience that would sanction an indignant rejoinder.
"I was afraid of this when you moved into the hotel. But then I told myself not to be a fool, you weren't the sort to encourage total strangers."
With malice, Lucinda enquired absurdly: "Are you reproaching me with relaxing from the conventions of my former milieu, Mr. Summerlad?"
"You know very well what I mean, Linda."