—What brings you to California, my dear, Prentice asked as he filled her cup.

—I’m not sure. I suppose I was in the mood for a bit of adventure.

—Well, you have come to the right place. Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway traveled all the way to Africa to see the creatures of the wild; to join in the hunt and put themselves in mortal danger. I tell you, they need only have come to this lobby.

The young woman laughed.

It was a marvelous laugh.

—Mortal danger . . . ? she queried.

—I do not exaggerate. In the coming minutes, you will see predators dressed in coats of fur as thick as an ocelot’s. In the high grass around the watering hole, you will see conniving dogs lying in wait for the approach of young, unguarded gazelles. And every day at five, there is a stampede.

She laughed again, and he smiled to hear it.

There was nothing jaded or ugly about her laughter. On the contrary, it was the laugh of one who knows well the foibles of others without begrudging them. It was a tribute to the human comedy—the sort of laugh he had not heard in years, or maybe eons. The sort of laugh that should not be interrupted!

(A waiter approaching with a plate of tea sandwiches is discreetly waved off.)

And what a refined sense of curiosity she exhibited in her questions. It was a curiosity one might have imagined in the young Galileo or Isaac Newton. Without a slavish adherence to the faddish certainties of yesteryears (in fact, with an instinctive suspicion of them), she had an interest in the world—and those invisible, immutable laws that actually spin it on its axis and keep us all from flinging into space.

So, leaving a history of Spanish missionaries and the great migration spawned by Sutter’s Mill to other professors, he told her instead of the founding of Beverly Hills. A desert within a desert, Beverly Hills had lain fallow for a thousand years until Pioneer Oil arrived and drilled deep into the ground in search of petrol only to discover . . . water—that tasteless, shapeless, colorless substance without which, nothing.

(Prentice gestured to the periphery, indicating by general reference the orange blossoms and honeysuckle that abounded just outside the lobby’s walls.)

Then he described for her how in 1912 the Andersons secured these ten acres with a million dollars and a dream—a dream to build amidst gardens and bowers, a temporary residence par excellence. And vision had led to vision. For within the hotel’s walls had been imagined Caribbean battles between privateers and Her Majesty’s fleet; the coldhearted dalliances of latter-day Cleopatras; and the all-encompassing charity of a bowler-hatted tramp.

—Why, not a hundred feet from here Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford, and Griffith struck the anvil of artistic independence to forge United Artists!

Etc., etc., etc.