Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Los <Angeks — -from a Bungalow Qourt despite all his cheating, because of the understandable humanity of his intercourse. Though we came from one end of Europe and he from the other, we understood one another instinctively. Sympathy ran straight between us. Rough and uncultured though he might be, modest bootlegger, petty cheat, sometimes fobbing us off slyly with damaged goods in a way that an American might have disdained to do, he was still European. There were no barriers between us. Indeed, this easiness of intercourse with the Greek brought home to us, for the first time, the actual existence of this inter-continental barrier. Kipling cried : Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. But to our minds the separation should be perhaps : Europe, Asia, Africa, America, never these four shall meet. There might be less friction between us could we but realize that we understand Americans almost as little as they understand us, and that, in spite of the fact that they dress like us and speak like us, they are in reality profoundly sundered from us both in habit and angle of vision. This barrier must probably become wider with the limitations of immigration. This continental difference was further emphasized by our charman, an odd, derelict Englishman. Hopeless failure though he was in a land of so much opportunity, he seemed to have no vices which would account for his poverty. He lived in some wretched shack at a pound a month, and eked out a menial existence by cleaning at a dollar an hour. Still he had retained all his insular arrogance. He talked rarely ; the history of his life remained a mystery, except for some vague allusions to " the time when I was a hengineer." He expressed himself in an odd, stilted English firmly on two occasions. Once he said : [37]