In an idle moment, Mma Makutsi had speculated as to the possible contents of a course of this name. Some of the time would be devoted to psychology and this part would include lessons on how men think. That was very important if one was the sort of girl who planned to trap a man. You had to know what attracted men and what frightened them. Mma Makutsi thought about this. What attracted men? Good looks? Certainly if a girl was pretty then she tended to get the attention of men; that was beyond any doubt at all. But it was not just prettiness that mattered, because there were many girls who did not look anything special but who seemed to find no difficulty in making men notice them. These girls dressed in a very careful way; they knew which colours appealed to men (red, and other bright colours; men were like cattle in that respect), and they knew how to walk and sit down in a way which would make men sit up and take notice. The walk was important: it should not be a simple walk, with one leg going forward, to be followed by the other; no, the legs had to bend and twist a bit, almost as if one was thinking of walking in a circle. And then there was the delicate issue of what to do with one’s bottom while one was walking. Some people thought that one could just leave one’s bottom to follow one when one was walking. Not so. A mere glance at any glamorous girl would show that the bottom had to be more involved.

Mma Makutsi thought about all this as she tidied the office that afternoon. It was all very dispiriting. She had been dismayed to see that woman at the dance class—the woman whose name she had forgotten but who had been one of the worst, the very worst, of the glamorous girls at the Botswana Secretarial College. The sight of that woman dancing with such a handsome man, while she, Mma Makutsi, stumbled about the floor with poor Phuti Radiphuti, struggling to make out what he was trying to say; that sight had been immensely depressing. And then there was the question of her glasses, so large that people saw themselves reflected and did not even bother to see the person behind the lenses. What could she do about those? Glasses were very expensive, and although she was better off now, she had so many other costs to meet—higher rent for her new house, new clothes to be bought, and more money needed by those at home in Bobonong.