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.

When he had passed under the Workhouse tower he came to a side street
which, according to Haim's description of the neighbourhood, ought to
have been Alexandra Grove. The large lamp on the corner, however, gave
no indication, nor in the darkness could any sign be seen on the blind
wall of either of the corner houses in Fulham Road. Doubtless in daytime
the street had a visible label, but the borough authorities evidently
believed that night endowed the stranger with powers of divination.
George turned hesitant down the mysterious gorge, which had two dim
lamps of its own, and which ended in a high wall, whereat could be
descried unattainable trees--possibly the grove of Alexandra. Silence
and a charmed stillness held the gorge, while in Fulham Road not a
hundred yards away omnibuses and an occasional hansom rattled along in
an ordinary world. George soon decided that he was not in Alexandra
Grove, on account of the size of the houses. He could not conceive Mr.
Haim owning one of them. They stood lofty in the gloom, in pairs,
secluded from the pavement by a stucco garden-wall and low bushes. They
were double-fronted, and their doors were at the summits of flights of