I took my seat in our aeromat with a feeling of complete mental exhaustion. One cannot experience such marvels as I had witnessed, without a limp revulsion. We rose and streaked toward the south, I too weary to resist, as Acquilla boldly put her arm about my waist and drawing my head toward her, pillowed it on her firm shoulder. CHAPTER XVI The Promenade of the Young Males was again a spectacle for which I was totally unprepared. The spot itself was of a sylvan beauty that recalled the Elysian fields with its shaded groves and soft greensward. Under the trees were hundreds of marble seats grouped according to the castes where the women as spectators had taken their posts of observation. I sought feverishly for my lovely Dianne but in vain. Following Acquilla, I took my place among the Minervenes and eagerly looked out at last upon my fellow men. For a moment, I could not believe my eyes. Groups of young men in twos and threes were sauntering through the sylvan avenues, with a rhythmical Andalusian swaying of their hips, glancing with timid provocation over their long plumed fans, at the Amazons who gazed down upon them with an estimating curiosity. I heard around me a buzz of comments, which I must confess, reminded me strangely of certain memories of club windows fronting on Fifth Avenue. “A fine neck and shoulders.” “The one, the third to the left, is a darling.” “What a charming figure!” “You can have him! Too athletic, but the boy over there is like a Greek god.” A Greek god! The expression in a flash made comprehensible to me the metamorphosis. I remembered that every young girl, somewhere in her life, had a Greek god as her ideal and now when the secrets of eugenics were in their hands, what more natural, than that they should breed to that ideal? Just as among the Amazons, I had noted three variations, the blond Greek, the dark Latin and the heavy intellectual Prussian, so I found the males were bred for two distinct varieties. There was a graceful Olympian type resembling the decadent period of Greek sculpture; lithe and delicately turned, rounded and dimpled, the hair curled above the forehead and piled high as in the famous Apollo Belvedere. In strong contrast the second type had brown dusky skins and glossy black hair brushed straight back. Slender and languorous in their movements, they had the slanted seductive eyes which recalled to me a certain predominant type of moving picture hero popular in my day. These last carried small lutes of an agreeable tinkling sound with which they accompanied their soft crooning voices. Their flowing tunics, Attic in feeling, but with a touch of the licentiousness of the later Directoire, were in multi-colored gossamer materials of an astonishing richness that revealed the flowing lines of the graceful young bodies beneath.