However, it is nice to get sonnets from time to time. They also write wonderful letters, which are absolute hell to answer, not much about oneself and full of all those fragments from Donne and Marvell.

One writer I know has an unnerving habit of taking two extra copies of all his love letters, one for himself, the other for the British Museum.

PAINTERS

Painters dress well, and have very nice handwriting. But don’t be fooled by that line about only seeing you as a beautiful form not as a sexual object. It’s the easiest way I know to get a woman to remove her clothes.

I think on the whole those involved in the arts make the best lovers, for they have more imagination, more ability to cater for your fantasies, and a bigger repertoire. Most of them have a kind of feline, slightly feminine mind—pure heaven from start to fetish. But don’t expect fidelity. Art has very little to do with morals.

ADVERTISING MEN

Most of their time is spent making presentations or discussing whether they should insert their eight-inch single column more than three times a week. They dress very well, if somewhat uniformly—navy blue suit, pink shirt—and are generally doused in free sample scent. When you meet them at parties, they say: “Actually I’m in advertising,” in a very apologetic way, because au fond they feel they ought to get out and do something worth-while like writing unprofitably, or painting unsellably. Nearly all of them have unsold novels in their bottom drawers and most of them live in Fulham. They have hearts with natural breaks in them.

Stages of Man

NOW LEAVING THE professions we move on to some of the stages of man.