It is curious to reflect that my marriage (which takes place today week) destroys once and for all my life's ambition. I have never won through to the goal I longed for, and now I never shall.

Ever since I can remember I have yearned to be known as a Bohemian. That was my ambition. I have ceased to struggle now. Married Bohemians live in Oakley Street, King's Road, Chelsea. We are to rent a house in Halkett Place.

Three years have passed since the excellent, but unsteady, steamship _Ibex_ brought me from Guernsey to Southampton. It was a sleepy, hot, and sticky wreck that answered to the name of James Orlebar Cloyster that morning; but I had my first youth and forty pounds, so that soap and water, followed by coffee and an omelette, soon restored me.

The journey to Waterloo gave me opportunity for tobacco and reflection.

What chiefly exercised me, I remember, was the problem whether it was possible to be a Bohemian, and at the same time to be in love. Bohemia I looked on as a region where one became inevitably entangled with women of unquestionable charm, but doubtful morality. There were supper parties.... Festive gatherings in the old studio.... Babette.... Lucille.... The artists' ball.... Were these things possible for a man with an honest, earnest, whole-hearted affection?

The problem engaged me tensely till my ticket was collected at Vauxhall. Just there the solution came. I would be a Bohemian, but a misogynist. People would say, "Dear old Jimmy Cloyster. How he hates women!" It would add to my character a pleasant touch of dignity and reserve which would rather accentuate my otherwise irresponsible way of living.

Little did the good Bohemians of the metropolis know how keen a recruit the boat train was bringing to them.

* * * * *

As a _pied-a-terre_ I selected a cheap and dingy hotel in York Street, and from this base I determined to locate my proper sphere.

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.