Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Los tAnge/es — -from an Empty House and contemplating the view of a never-ceasing procession of cars and trams along Vermont Avenue, two rows of huge, flamboyant hoardings, a half-building church in reinforced concrete, several twelve-storeyed blocks of service flats, and the normal undergrowth of low bungalow roofs stretching for miles to the dim contours of the Beverley Hills, on which were the palaces of the movie magnates. Nobody would want to buy a house with a sick man planted in it ; and although obviously I should have to leave on the signing of the purchase papers, I must nevertheless have acted almost like a spring frost on the tender buds of the acquisitive sense burgeoning in those * viewers' ' souls. I remember a Bab Ballad by Gilbert which concerned a man named Robinson who, if I remember rightly, had . . . often eaten oysters, But had never had enough. Up till this moment that had been my own position with regard to oranges. In my youth Christmas had meant primarily * oranges/ We had toured Spain, but, alas, never in the orange season ! For years my appetite had been whetted by the coloured advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post warning me that I was suffering from acidosis and that nothing would cure me but the plentiful juice of Sunkist oranges. Occasionally I plucked up courage to order * orange juice ' at some cafe or on the train, to be rewarded, at frightful expense, with a mealy fluid that looked like strained vegetable-marrow water and tasted as though an orange, having breathed upon the liquid, had passed on. Now I was flung into the position of shipwrecked Robinson on his oyster island. Not only was I given oranges ad lib., I was refused all other kinds of sustenance. When Jo was not rushing off to the library to find more detective stories she was developing a marvellous wrist action with the orange-pulper. Thirty