My friend and I wanted to go to a beauty parlour today, the most reputable beauty parlour actually. But the problem with reputable beauty parlours is that it is difficult to get an appointment. We'll have to go and have our eyelashes dyed some other time. Instead we I went to the museum. The Mauritshuis to be precise. It is the place where the Girl with the Pearl Earring is kept and that lovely View of Delft we have over the fireplace in the SCR. There was a special exhibition of a Dutch painter who painted really small pictures of fruit and vegetables. I bought a print of one of the strawberry paintings. I just need to buy a nice dark coloured fame for it. On our way back home we passed a second hand book shop. Outside on a table were book for 50 cents each. The one on top had the title: `Occult Happenings´ and was written by a professor Feldmann and printed in 1938. It is about telepathy and ghosts and such. I could not leave it there. So I picked it up to go inside and buy it. But under this book was a book called: Elegance, the secret of feminine charm by Miss Genevieve Antoine Dariaux. I opened it and my eye fell on the following advice: "Appearing in public with a young panther, a tame crocodile or an orang-utan (even a very intelligent one) must absolutely be left to little stars that need advertising, because something like this creates a circus atmosphere which is utterly irreconcilible with the behaviour of an elegant lady."
You understand this book now belongs to me. It is wonderful. One long alphabetical list of things related to etiquette. This citation came from the section Animals. But there is pictures, daughters, colours, suits, shoes, zippers, cities, weekends, rain, rings, nightclubs, royalty, hunting, gardening, designers, earrings, bal masqués, folklore, knees, buttons, perfume, Paris (ooh! must read!), sleeves, age, leather, lunches, wigs, ice skating, teenagers, stripes, working, friends, shopping in Uruguay! Oh how did I ever survive without this book? From now on there is life before the secret of feminine charm and life after. I'm so sorry it is in Dutch. I would make copies for all of you on the important topics such as sale, mountain climbing and the weather.

It is Valentine's day. Normally this does not mean much to me but this time it is different. I actually received a card! Unfortunately it was anonymous. It just said "From a streemly secret person". I guess I'll never know who sent it. Thank you secret Valentine! I hope I will at least get a chance to dance with you this weekend, even though I do not know who you are.

The Ideal Brunette...goodness...what a list to live up to.


MISS ALLONBY: The Ideal Brunette! Oh, the Ideal Brunette should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. She should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. She should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. She should always say much more than she means, and always mean much more than she says. She should never run down other pretty blondes. That would show she had no taste, or make one suspect that she had too much. No; she should be nice about them all, but say that somehow they don't attract her. If we ask her a question about anything, she should give us an answer all about ourselves. She should invariably praise us for whatever qualities she knows we haven't got. But she should be pitiless, quite pitiless, in reproaching us for the virtues that we have never dreamed of possessing. She should never believe that we know the use of useful things. That would be unforgivable. But she should shower on us everything we don't want. She should persistently compromise us in public, and treat us with absolute respect when we are alone. And yet she should be always ready to have a perfectly terrible scene, whenever we want one, and to become miserable, absolutely miserable, at a moment's notice, and to overwhelm us with just reproaches in less than twenty minutes, and to be positively violent at the end of half an hour, and to leave us for ever at a quarter to eight, when we have to go and dress for dinner. And when, after that, one has seen her for really the last time, and she has refused to take back the little things she has given one, and promised never to communicate with one again, or to write one any foolish letters, she should be perfectly broken-hearted, and telegraph to one all day long, and send one little notes every half-hour by a private hansom, and dine quite alone at the club, so that every one should know how unhappy she was. And after a whole dreadful week, during which one has gone about everywhere with one's wife, just to show how absolutely lonely one was, she may be given a third last parting, in the evening, and then, if her conduct has been quite irreproachable, and one has behaved really badly to her, she should be allowed to admit that she has been entirely in the wrong, and when she has admitted that, it becomes a blonde's duty to forgive, and one can do it all over again from the beginning, with variations.