The few words from Mr. Enwright about Chelsea had sufficed to turn Chelsea into Elysium, Paradise, almost into Paris.  No other quarter of London was inhabitable by a rising architect.  As soon as Haim had gone George had begun to look up Chelsea in the office library, and as Mr. Enwright happened to be an active member of the Society for the Survey of the Memorials of Greater London, the library served him well.  In an hour and a half he had absorbed something of the historical topography of Chelsea.  He knew that the Fulham Road upon which he was now walking was a boundary of Chelsea.  He knew that the Queen’s Elm public-house had its name from the tradition that Elizabeth had once sheltered from a shower beneath an elm tree which stood at that very corner.  He knew that Chelsea had been a ‘village of palaces,’ and what was the function of the Thames in the magnificent life of that village.  The secret residence of Turner in Chelsea, under the strange alias of Admiral Booth, excited George’s admiration; he liked the idea of hidden retreats and splendid, fanciful pseudonyms.  But the master-figure of Chelsea for George was Sir Thomas More.  He could see Sir Thomas More walking in his majestic garden by the river with the King’s arm round his neck, and Holbein close by, and respectful august prelates and a nagging wife in the background.  And he could see Sir Thomas More taking his barge for the last journey to the Tower, and Sir Thomas More’s daughter coming back in the same barge with her father’s head on board.  Curious!  He envied Sir Thomas More.

“Darned bad tower for a village of palaces!” he thought, not of the Tower of London, but of the tower of the Workhouse which he was now approaching.  He thought he could design an incomparably better tower than that.  And he saw himself in the future, the architect of vast monuments, strolling in a grand garden of his own at evening with other distinguished and witty persons.

But there were high-sounding names in the history of Chelsea besides those of More and Turner.  Not names of people!  Cremorne and Ranelagh!  Cremorne to the west and Ranelagh to the east.  The legend of these vanished resorts of pleasure and vice stirred his longings and his sense of romantic beauty—­especially Ranelagh with its Rotunda. (He wanted, when the time came, to be finely vicious, as he wanted to be everything.  An architect could not be great without being everything.) He projected himself into the Rotunda, with its sixty windows, its countless refreshment-boxes, its huge paintings, and the orchestra in the middle, and the expensive and naughty crowd walking round and round and round on the matting, and the muffled footsteps and the swish of trains on the matting, and the specious smiles and whispers, and the blare of the band and the smell of the lamps and candles....  Earl’s Court was a poor, tawdry, unsightly thing after that.