childish quality can be charming but it can also be irritating; the inno-Acent have no experience of the world, and their sweetness can prove cloying. In Milan Kundera's novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the hero dreams that he is trapped on an island with a group of children. Soon their wonderful qualities become intensely annoying to him; after a few days of exposure to them he cannot relate to them at all. The dream turns into a nightmare, and he longs to be back among adults, with real things to do and talk about. Because total childishness can quickly grate, the most se-ductive Naturals are those who, like Josephine Baker, combine adult expe-rience and wisdom with a childlike manner. It is this mixture of qualities that is most alluring.

Society cannot tolerate too many Naturals. Given a crowd of Cora Pearls or Charlie Chaplins, their charm would quickly wear off. In any case it is usually only artists, or people with abundant leisure time, who can af-ford to go all the way. The best way to use the Natural character type is in specific situations when a touch of innocence or impishness will help lower your target's defenses. A con man plays dumb to make the other person trust him and feel superior. This kind of feigned naturalness has countless applications in daily life, where nothing is more dangerous than looking smarter than the next person; the Natural pose is the perfect way to disguise your cleverness. But if you are uncontrollably childish and cannot turn it off, you run the risk of seeming pathetic, earning not sympathy but pity and disgust.

Similarly, the seductive traits of the Natural work best in one who is still young enough for them to seem natural. They are much harder for an older person to pull off. Cora Pearl did not seem so charming when she was still wearing her pink flouncy dresses in her fifties. The Duke of Buck-ingham, who seduced everyone in the English court in the 1620s (includ-ing the homosexual King James I himself), was wondrously childish in looks and manner; but this became obnoxious and off-putting as he grew older, and he eventually made enough enemies that he ended up being mur-dered. As you age, then, your natural qualities should suggest more the child's open spirit, less an innocence that will no longer convince anyone.