That evening, entering the dining-room, which was a great, soft-pine Sahara of a place dotted at regular intervals with circular oases called tables, each flowing with ice water and abounding in celery, in the native ripe olives shining in their own oils, and in yellow poppy blossoms in vases, the Pilkinses instantly and intuitively discovered that they had been ushered into a circle new to them. Some of the diners in sight were plainly, like themselves, tourists, transients, fly-by-night sightseers from the East, here to-day and going to-morrow. But sundry others present, being those who had the look about them of regular guests, were somehow different. Without being told, the newcomers at once divined that they were in a haunt of the moving-picture folk, and also by the same processes of instinctive discernment were informed of another thing: As between the actors newly recruited from that realm of art which persons of a reminiscent turn of mind are beginning to speak of as the spoken drama, and the actors who had been bred up and developed by its one-time little half-sister, the moving-picture game, a classifying and separating distinction existed. It was a distinction not definable in words, perhaps; nevertheless, it was as apparent there in that dining-room as elsewhere. You know how the thing goes in other lines of allied industries? Take two agents now--a road agent, let us say, and a book agent. Both are agents; both belong to the predatory group; both ply their trades upon the highway with utter strangers for their chosen prey; and yet in the first flash we can tell a book agent from a road agent, and vice versa. So it was with these ladies and gentlemen upon whom Chester K. Pilkins and wife--beg pardon, Mrs. Chester K. Pilkins and husband--now gazed. At the table to which a post-graduate head-waitress escorted them and there surrendered them into the temporary keeping of a sophomore side-waitress there sat, in a dinner coat, a young man of most personable appearance and address, with whom, as speedily developed, it was not hard to become acquainted, but, on the contrary, easy. Almost as soon as the Pilkinses were seated he broke through the film ice of formality by remarking that Southern California was, on the whole, a wonderful country, was it not? Speaking as one, or as one and a fractional part of another, they agreed with him. Did it not possess a wonderful climate? It did. And so on and so forth. You know how one of these conversations grows, expands and progresses.