Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood in England to demand whence came or whither go these * suites ' displayed along Tottenham Court Road or other haunts of the furniture-dealer ; in what houses hang these gilt-framed, warranted hand-painted oil-pictures ? In America their destination is no mystery. The rooming-house engulfs them. A half of the newly-weds and all of the great tribe of the peripatetic must be content with the stamped plush of their rather uninspiring luxury. Our bungalow-court lodging was perhaps a little symbolic : flamboyant and vivid without, standardized with a kind of crisp, new dinginess within ; outside cheerful in the very fervour of its raw, half-exotic bad taste, inside aloof and unapproachable, seeming to hold one off, with an almost sullen determination to resist any of Jo's approaches toward intimacy or her efforts to make it seem cosy and homelike. All the eight months of our sentence at Los Angeles we felt like intruders in our own house. Amid that aloof dinginess the splendid bathroom glowed white and lovely like a vision of the Virgin in a miracle play, and, lest we should be accused of a light blasphemy in the metaphor, we must insist that the American cult of the bathroom has much of the religious, and that few of the younger generation whom we have met if forced to choose between cleanliness and godliness would hesitate long over the choice. With the kindly help of May Beechman, who had appointed herself as a rather worried but very affectionate godmother, we settled ourselves in our new house. Only one cloud dimmed the immediate future. On our previous visit to Los Angeles, when we had lectured to the Friday Morning Club, and the Book and Play Club, we had been the object of invitations from a large number of almost overwhelmingly enthusiastic people who, on one introduction, had at once constituted themselves our intimate friends. We had then explained our immediate departure for San Francisco. They [22]