Reeves, Manon Lescaut, and Prince Pansy—aliases, because few refined androgynes would be so rash as to betray their legal name in the Underworld. Not alone from their names, but also from their loud apparel, the timbre of their voices, their frail physique, and their feminesque mannerisms, I discerned they were androgynes. Indeed effeminacy stuck out all over Prince Pansy. Manon Lescaut's only conspicuous anatomical feminesqueness was extraordinary breadth of hips. While Reeves' trunk and legs were not so feminine, he excelled in womanly features, with such marine-blue eyes and pink-peony cheeks as any beholder regretted should be wasted on a member (?) of the sterner sex. Moreover, Reeves alone, of the two score ultra-androgynes that I at different times met at Paresis Hall, was naturally beardless.
While Roland, Manon, and the "Prince" looked to be between twenty and twenty-five, I later ascertained the first mentioned was thirty-seven. As already observed, perennial youth is an earmark of ultra-androgynism.
Roland was chief speaker. The essence of his remarks was something like the following: "Mr. Werther—or Jennie June, as doubtless you prefer to be addressed—I have seen you at the Hotel Comfort, but you were always engaged. A score of us have formed a little club, the Cercle Hermaphroditos. For we need to unite for defense against the world's bitter persecution of bisexuals. We care to admit only extreme types—such as like to doll themselves up in feminine finery. We sympathize with, but do not care to be intimate with, the mild types, some of whom you
