The fountain in Piccadilly Circus was the gayest thing in London.  It mingled the fresh tinkling of water with the odour and flame of autumn blossoms and the variegated colours of shawled women who passed their lives on its margin engaged in the commerce of flowers.  Edward Henry bought an aster from a fine bold, red-cheeked, blowsy, dirty wench with a baby in her arms, and left some change for the baby.  He was in a very tolerant and charitable mood, and could excuse the sins and the stupidity of all mankind.  He reflected forgivingly that Rose Euclid and her friends had perhaps not displayed an abnormal fatuity in discussing the name of the theatre before they had got the lease of the site for it.  Had not he himself bought all the option without having even seen the site?  The fact was that he had had no leisure in his short royal career for such details as seeing the site.  He was now about to make good the omission.

It is a fact that as he turned northwards from Piccadilly Circus, to the right of the County Fire Office, in order to spy out the land upon which his theatre was to be built, he hesitated, under the delusion that all the passers-by were staring at him!  He felt just as he might have felt had he been engaged upon some scheme nefarious.  He even went back and pretended to examine the windows of the County Fire Office.  Then, glancing self-consciously about, he discerned—­not unnaturally—­the words “Regent Street” on a sign.

“There you are!” he murmured, with a thrill.  “There you are!  There’s obviously only one name for that theatre—­’The Regent.’  It’s close to Regent Street.  No other theatre is called ‘The Regent.’  Nobody before ever had the idea of ‘Regent’ as a name for a theatre.  ‘Muses’ indeed!...  ‘Intellectual’! ...  ‘The Regent Theatre’!  How well it comes off the tongue!  It’s a great name!  It’ll be the finest name of any theatre in London!  And it took yours truly to think of it!”

Then he smiled privately at his own weakness....  He too, like the despised Rose, was baptizing the unborn!  Still, he continued to dream of the theatre, and began to picture to himself the ideal theatre.  He discovered that he had quite a number of startling ideas about theatre-construction, based on his own experience as a playgoer.

When, with new courage, he directed his feet towards the site, upon which he knew there was an old chapel known as Queen’s Glasshouse Chapel, whose ownership had slipped from the nerveless hand of a dying sect of dissenters, he could not find the site and he could not see the chapel.  For an instant he was perturbed by a horrid suspicion that he had been victimized by a gang of swindlers posing as celebrated persons.  Everything was possible in this world and century!  None of the people who had appeared in the transaction had resembled his previous conceptions of such people!  And confidence-thieves always operated in the grandest hotels!  He immediately decided that if the sequel should prove him to be a simpleton and gull, he would at any rate be a silent simpleton and gull.  He would stoically bear the loss of two hundred pounds and breathe no word of woe.