Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood private dwellings, or apartment houses spread far and wide over the great bungalow plain and springing up like a particoloured rash over all the hills within a radius of twelve or fifteen miles from the city hall. My range of vision was naturally limited, tied as I was to my small meanderings round the cypress-tree. But as my health began to be re-established Jo enlarged her limits of movement whenever somebody would take her out in a car. The large rectangular monotony of the town, combined with her innate lack of directional sense, gave Jo almost a horror of venturing on foot in the streets. There was, indeed, small pleasure in such exercise. At a pedestrian pace the eye could feast only on endless repetitions of low houses, green lawns cut with pavements and set with fern palms, long lines of hoardings plastered with huge and garish posters, crude, square open shops made from raw brick, garages and gasoline-stations, and numberless street-crossings which one was not allowed to pass over unless the signal lights permitted. Her excursions afoot were dictated by sheer necessity to the public library or to the grocery, all the other necessities came to our door. The milkman was our alarum clock ; the cheery ice-man in his blue-and-white-striped overall, who put his daily ration unasked into the ice-box, and the Greek with vegetables were daily callers ; the water-man, the egg-man, and the olive-pedlar measured our appetites and spaced their visits to suit. Sometimes gluts of perishable fruit occurred, and the town would be filled with motor-car pedlars selling quantities of bananas for a shilling, peaches or apples by the bucketful for a few pence. In spite of a long residence in America, the Greek was still European. With him we felt none of that curious invisible barrier that separates the New World from the Old. Undoubtedly the man cheated us, but we felt easier with him [36]