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Los ^Angeles — -from an Empty House
in low buildings with stairs, or in bungalows grouped in sets of a dozen at a time ; we could have sheltered behind walls of steel and brick, of honest clap-boarding, or of chicken wire, tarred paper, and plaster ; we could have picked our style as freely as our material. Within the four hundred square miles of city area, " the biggest city in the world/ ' architects had apparently gone crazy trying to create some new note amid a widespread monotony. Jo, of course, did not have to search all of the four hundred square miles for a lodging. Within a mile of my bed, on the fringes of Hollywood, the nobler houses of the moderately rich dwindled suddenly into the modest dwellings of what we may call the great bungalow plain, which embraces perhaps some two hundred or more miles of the city's inflated area. On this edge of the great bungalow plain Jo and Mrs Beechman easily found what they were looking for. Most of the bungalows in this district had succumbed to a style vaguely called Mexican, built of rough-cast, ochred plaster smeared on tarred paper with a chicken-wire foundation, a type of construction which, considering the unaggressive quality of the climate, would shelter one from the weather, but which was not intended to stand severe treatment — a hard-pitched cricket-ball would have dented most of the walls like a spoon on egg-shell. The courts were arranged as a three-sided oblong. At the bottom was usually a single bungalow, so that the side dwellings stared into one another's windows across a central footpath in a manner disconcertingly intimate to our European susceptibilities. The windows were, however, romantically small, assisting the illusion of Mexicanism, and although this did perhaps increase the sense of privacy by making them difficult to look out of, it also darkened the interiors in a most dismal fashion. These bungalow courts were too cramped to offer any opportunity of sitting outside in the air, and one might almost come to the opinion that the
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