I got back to Los Angeles yesterday morning. Instead of starting, as planned, for New York, my change of plans being due to a telegram from Mr. Lehr of the Goldwyn Company asking me if I would dine on Monday night next to meet Charlie Chaplin, who is due to arrive that day. And so of course I succumbed to another delay in my schedule. A month ago I should have been back in New York but time, they say, was made for slaves--. This evening, at sunset, Dick and I drove past the flying field and watched the planes set out against the evening sky. Dick begged to be allowed to go up, but I was frankly afraid. This morning I was ashamed of my fear. I know that I was wrong. One should always trust people, things, Destiny. So Louise and Dick and I crushed into a small front seat and took a flight out over the sea. It was cool and it was steady. The green fields and the plough patches looked like little mats laid out to dry. The motors on the roads like small crawling beetles. We could see the mountains behind the mountains, and way down below us, on the earth, our little shadow followed us. Dick loved it--he wanted to fly on and on. It is a great privilege to be born in an age when one can get up and leave the earth the moment one is bored with it. OCTOBER 31, 1921. _Los Angeles._ Charlie Chaplin arrived in Los Angeles today at noon, on his return from Europe. I met him at dinner. We were just a party of four at the Lehrs. It has been a wonderful evening--I seem to have been talking heart to heart with one who understands, who is full of deep thought and deep feeling. He is full of ideals and has a passion for all that is beautiful. A real artist. He talked a great deal about his trip to England. It had been, I gathered, one of the big emotions of his life. He left, as he said, “poor and unknown” to return 10 years later famous.... What made a great impression on him was the psychology of the English crowd, which seemed to him to contain such a spirit of real affection. Of course Charlie is English--and England was welcoming her own. Besides, who has more right to public adulation than this man who has brought laughter and happiness to millions? But it was sad, he said, in England--something had happened, or was happening. He was not sure if it was a decay that had set in, or whether it was a reconstruction. But everyone looked as if they had suffered, and it saddened him to be there. A good country to belong to, we agreed, but not a country “for a creative artist,” he advised me to remain where I am. And then, in spite of his emotional, enthusiastic temperament, with a soundness of judgment that surprised me, he said: “Don’t get lost on the path of propaganda. Live your life of an artist ... the other goes on--always.”