This was a place of orange-growers, young fellows from the East.  Its University Club was large and prosperous.  Its streets were wide.  Flowers lined the curbs.  There were few fences.  The houses were in good taste.  Even the telephone poles were painted green so as to be unobtrusive.  Bob thought it one of the most attractive places he had ever seen, as indeed it should be, for it was built practically to order by people of intelligence.

Thence he drove through miles and miles of orange groves, so large that the numerous workmen go about their work on bicycles.  Even here in the country, the roadsides were planted with palms and other ornamental trees, and gay with flowers.  Abruptly he came upon a squalid village of the old regime, with ugly frame houses, littered streets, sagging sidewalks foul with puddles, old tin cans, rubbish; populous with children and women in back-yard dressing sacks—­a distressing reminder of the worst from the older-established countries.  And again, at the end of the week, he most unexpectedly found himself seated on a country-club verandah, having a very good time, indeed, with some charming specimens of the idle rich.  He talked polo, golf, tennis and horses; he dined at several most elaborate “cottages”; he rode forth on glossy, bang-tailed horses, perfectly appointed; he drove in marvellously conceived traps in company with most engaging damsels.  When, finally, he reached Los Angeles again he carried with him, as standing for California, not even the heterogeneous but fairly coherent idea one usually gains of a single commonwealth, but an impression of many climes and many peoples.

“Yes,” said Baker, “and if you’d gone North to where I live, you’d have struck a different layout entirely.”

V

There remained in Bob’s initial Southern California experience one more episode that brought him an acquaintance, apparently casual, but which later was to influence him.

Of an afternoon he walked up Main Street idly and alone.  The exhibit of a real estate office attracted him.  Over the door, in place of a sign, hung a huge stretched canvas depicting not too rudely a wide country-side dotted with model farms of astounding prosperity.  The window was filled with pumpkins, apples, oranges, sheaves of wheat, bottles full of soft fruits preserved in alcohol, and the like.  As background was an oil painting in which the Lucky Lands occupied a spacious pervading foreground, while in clever perspectives the Coast Range, the foothills, and the other cities of the San Fernando Valley supplied a modest setting.  This was usual enough.

At the door stood a very alert man with glasses.  He scrutinized closely every passerby.  Occasionally he hailed one or the other, conversed earnestly a brief instant, and passed them inside.  Gradually it dawned on Bob that this man was acting in the capacity of “barker”—­that with quite admirable perspicacity and accuracy, he was engaged in selecting from the countless throngs the few possible purchasers for Lucky Lands.  Curious to see what attraction was offered to induce this unanimity of acquiescence to the barker’s invitation, the young man approached.