The real reason he can’t sign up to Darby and Joandom is because he fears that all women are only really after his wealth and the family silver, the frugally milked blue-chip portfolio and his handmade shirts. Any woman he fancies must, as heads follow tails, be out to pick his pocket and empty the safe. He knows that the evolutionary purpose of every woman is to find a male, steal his sperm, fleece him, skin him and throw him back, a broken and shivering pauper. My friend is extreme, but he’s not alone…

Isn’t there, I ask, a natural fairness in a girl with a marketable personal value bartering it to her best advantage? She is, after all, sitting quite literally on a decreasing asset. Don’t absurd wealth and fantasy nubility deserve each other? Young, fungible girls who marry ancient Croesuses are regularly, collectively and publicly branded merciless hookers and no better than they should be. But nobody ever castigates the English aristocracy, who for generations made unseemly forays to America to carry off heiresses and marry them to their feckless, chinless, sexually incontinent elder sons. Nobody, particularly no woman, ever spares a smidgen of sympathy for the young girl, over-endowed with all the sensual bait, who can’t be employed or taken seriously as anything other than a sexual functionary.