We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Los ^Angeles — -from a Bungalow Qourt
she had to repair in her person the ravages due to the evil and anxiety of housework. By the time that was over she had to go to bed, to begin again on the following morning. Every day the vacuum-cleaner chanted its matutinal dirge, and even her husband looked as though he had been vacuumcleaned with the rest and finished with the polishing cloth.
Yet you must not think of her as a slatternly drudge or a conventional landlady, for she would have been, to English eyes, a wealthy woman. Her husband was the best clarinet and saxophone player on the Californian coast, one of those lucky beings who exhale music as naturally as a bird sings ; who never was forced to practise scales for his fingers' celerity. Chief musician in an important movie orchestra he earned his three thousand pounds a year with little effort. In addition to this the court, with its aggregate of fourteen dwellings, represented little less than a thousand pounds a year in rentals, and they had built a second in the neighbourhood. They also owned plots of land in all parts of the city, so that, apart from purely speculative investments, their income could easily amount to five thousand pounds a year or more.
Our visitors, apart from the two or three Los Angelesians who showed a friendly faithfulness in spite of the disgrace of my collapse, were almost all commercial. Immediately the report spread that new lodgers had moved into Bungalow No. 6, 2000 Blank Avenue, the travelling salesmen crowded to our doors. Jo, with eager delight, saw our cupboards slowly fill with free samples of all kinds. They seemed determined that we should be clean at any cost, for soap was thrust upon us in such quantities that we bought none during the greater part of our stay ; clearly America, clamouring for bigger and better cleanliness, had miscalculated either the length of our visit or our capacities for washing. Strange breakfast foods, in brightly coloured cardboard boxes full of stuff like toasted sawdust, but guaranteed to contain all the
[25]