III. George Greenwood.[[45]]

Ralphie, I am now going to tell you about the foremost specimen of young manhood I ever met. If a man show had been held five years ago, on the model of the horse show, the young fellow I am going to tell you about would have won first prize.

You know that most of us hermaphroditoi have a single soul-mate. Of course they are uncultured. Mere diamonds in the rough. For the past four years, George Greenwood, whom you have seen with me, has been my own soul-mate. For while I have flirted with many others, he alone has been like an adopted son—as we older hermaphroditoi look upon our soul-mates. At present, George is twenty-nine, and in outer attractiveness, only a wreck of what he was when I “adopted” him.[[46]]

George’s Antecedents.

I must explain, mon cheri, that George is not well bred. About twelve years ago a portrait painter of my acquaintance ran across him selling papers on Broadway. George was then only seventeen. At first sight, the artist felt George’s unique beauty and asked him to pose. Later other artists did George in oils and with the chisel.

He has never known who his parents were. For he was a foundling. When discharged from the orphan asylum at fourteen, he was apprenticed to an upholsterer. But on account of George’s quick temper and nasty tongue, he could hold no position more than a month. When my friend ran across him, George’s thoroughly bad record had left him only one means of earning his bread: selling papers. But ever since his ideal physique was discovered by my friend, George’s path through life has been strewn with roses.

Four years ago I happened to lay eyes on George as he posed in my friend’s studio. Right away his lines of face, head, limbs, and body—hitherto even undreamed of—held me spell-bound and I took him into my home. For I thought George was Michelangelo’s Adam stepped down into flesh and blood out of the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Angelo’s nude figures of youthful men have alone approached George’s ideal lines.

But he has been such a drunkard and high-liver in general that his beauty—particularly his head and face—is now far below par. For two years he has not been hired as a model. And he does not want to earn in any other way. He has leaned wholly on me to keep up his life in the Rialto as all-around sport.

Defective copy of Michelangelo’s Adam in Sistine Chapel, Rome: An Androgyne’s Conception of the Ideal Adolescent