Chelsea was the first place that occurred to me. There was St. John's
Wood, of course, but that was such a long way off. Chelsea was
comparatively near to the heart of things, and I had heard that one
might find there artistic people whose hand-to-mouth, Saturnalian
existence was redolent of that exquisite gaiety which so attracted my
own casual temperament.

Sallying out next morning into the brilliant sunshine and the dusty
rattle of York Street, I felt a sense of elation at the thought that
the time for action had come. I was in London. London! The home of the
fragrant motor-omnibus and the night-blooming Hooligan. London, the
battlefield of the literary aspirant since Caxton invented the printing
press. It seemed to me, as I walked firmly across Westminster Bridge,
that Margie gazed at me with the lovelight in her eyes, and that a
species of amorous telepathy from Guernsey was girding me for the
fight.

Manresa Road I had once heard mentioned as being the heart of Bohemian
Chelsea. To Manresa Road, accordingly, I went, by way of St. James's
Park, Buckingham Palace Road, and Lower Sloane Street. Thence to Sloane
Square. Here I paused, for I knew that I had reached the last outpost
of respectable, inartistic London.

"How sudden," I soliloquised, "is the change. Here I am in Sloane
Square, regular, business-like, and unimaginative; while, a few hundred
yards away, King's Road leads me into the very midst of genius,
starvation, and possibly Free Love."

Sloane Square, indeed, gave me the impression, not so much of a suburb