The woman pictured with the cheetah is Elia, George's third wife. She was a volunteer nurse in a
French hospital in WWI, who took care of George when he was brought to the hospital after being
wounded late in the war. He had badgered his parents into buying him a captaincy in the Italian
army when the war started, thinking it would be the next big adventure. He transferred to the
French army partway thru the war, and later to the American army when the U.S. entered the war.

The two of them fell in love, and George brought Elia back to the States with him when the war
ended. She was charming and sophisticated, and his parents found her a welcome change of pace
from the chorus girls George had chosen for his first two short-lived marriages. They remained
married for the rest of their lives, spending much of their time apart so as not to get on each
other's nerves. Elia divided her time between the Whittell estate in Woodside and her native
Paris. George was happy anywhere there was liquor, showgirls, and a high-stakes poker game.

A fellow ambulance driver who was a drinking buddy of George's used their romance as the basis
for a novel about his war experiences. The drinking buddy's name was Ernest Hemingway, and the
book about the fictionalized George and Elia was "A Farewell to Arms", published in 1929.