sh smile at the atrabilious photograph
which the one camera-artist of Buckhorn made of Struthers and my three
pop-eyed kiddies....

These are, without exception, the friendliest people I have ever known.
The old millionaire lumberman from Bay City, who lives next door to me,
pushes through the hedge with platefuls of green figs and tid-bits from
his gardens, and delightful girls whose names I don't even know come in
big cars and ask to take little Dinkie off for one of their lawn
_fetes_. It even happened that a movie-actor--who, I later discovered,
was a drug-addict--insisted on accompanying me home and informed me on
the way that I had a dream of a face for camera-work. It quite set me
up, for all its impertinence, until I learned to my sorrow that it had
flowered out of nothing more than an extra shot in the arm.

They are a friendly and companionable folk, and they'd keep me on the
go all the time if I'd let 'em. But I've only had energy enough to run
over to Los Angeles twice, though there are a dozen or two people I
must look up in that more frolicsome suburb. But I can't get away from
the feeling, the truly rural feeling, that I'm among strangers. I
can't rid myself of the extremely parochial impression that these
people are not my people. And there's a valetudinarian aspect to the
place which I find slightly depressing. For this seems to be the one
particular point where the worn-out old money-maker comes to die, and
the antique ladies with asthma struggle for an extra year or two of
the veranda rocking-chair, and rickety old _beaux_ sit about in
Panamas and white flannels and listen to the hardening of their
arteries. And I haven't quite finished with life yet--not if I know
it--not by a long shot!

But one has to be educated for idleness, I find, almost as much as for
industry. I knew the trick once, but I've lost the hang of it. The one
thing that impresses me, on coming straight from prairie life to a
city like this, is how much women-folk can have done for them without
quite knowing it. The machinery of life here is so intricate and yet
so adequate that it denudes them of all the normal and primitive
activities of their grandmothers, so they have to invent troubles and
contrive quite unnecessary activities to keep from being bored to
extinction. Everything seems to come to them ready-made and duly
prepared, their bread, their light and fuel and water, their meat and
milk. All that, and the daily drudgery