86 MY AMERICAN FRIENDS

" Oh " (at least I did); and when you have seen
all she has to show you, " Oh " will be sufficient
to record your main impressions and to pay her
your respects. In a sense there is nothing else
to say. As Friday relates in Robinson Crusoe,
41 Oh " was all the savages said by way of adoration
when they went up the mountain once a year to
worship their great god, Benamuckee. Let us
say " Oh " to Hollywood. Yet here, as in every
city of America, even in the most gorgeous of her
Babylons and the most wicked of her Gomorrahs,
you will find, without having far to search, some
of the best and most lovable people in the world.
I have heard the same of the London slums.

Such was the first stage of my initiation into the
unreality of America. The second stage was also
reached at Hollywood, Suddenly, for no reason
I can think of, the Lady of the Painted Face
transformed herself into a ghost and a habitation
of ghosts, I had gone with some friends to see a
moving picture show in the gorgeous Chinese
theatre* The piece was Mata Hart and the chief
actors Greta Garbo and Ramon Navarro. As I
watched the show, the theatre and the people in it"
gradually became, to my consciousness, insub-
stantial and shadowy, their substance seeming to
transfer itself to the figures on the screen. Feel-
ing rather uncomfortable in the company of so
many ghosts, and half-suspecting that I might
be a ghost myself, I slipped out during an interval,
to smoke a cigar, take a turn or two in the street