"Not especially, no."

"All right then. Haut out-marriages are usually ostensibly volunteered for, if not as enthusiastically as mine, but someone who was meant to be shown the door and didn't go would find this uncomfortable after a few declined opportunities... internally there's no relationship arrangement of any kind, though."

"Uncomfortable?"

"Oh, if I had gotten to age forty-five without befriending Lisbet or marrying Miles or doing anything else very much off-script, and I'd turned down two or three or four ghem-lords due to be awarded brides over the last fifteen years, I imagine I would find that on aging out of my improv group the more advanced one would find that I mysteriously didn't pass their audition, that the kitchen was always having mysterious shortages of whatever I wanted to eat, that I couldn't convince any of my favorite servitors to put in for transfers to a private estate when I was ready to move to one, that I couldn't secure such an estate at all, that whenever I marked a spot in any lab or workshop as being mine I'd come back to find all my tools put away and my project disturbed, that no one would talk to me, that if I had a love-poem - I'm not sure of the best word to encompass the category in local dialect; lover? - if I had a romantic interest, at any rate, that all his friends thought he was too good for me and ought to leave me to my lesser marriage-related fate, that I was not invited to go anywhere or do anything but sit in my apartment and become resigned."

"That sounds... uncomfortable, yes."

"I'm introverted enough that I could have put up with it if all the ghem-lords were odious enough, for a while anyway, but obviously I hunted up a third option at earliest opportunity."

"Yes, of course."

"Anyway, this is uncommon. Most haut-ladies meet their constellations' standards just fine. There's more than a million haut and someone's only married off every couple of years, on all the planets put together."

"It seems... strange to have such a thing in the first place. There's no way to, to get kicked out of the Vor."

"Not in terms of ceasing to have it attached to your names, but - socially? No? Nothing?"

"Nothing. Vor are Vor. It's possible to be an unpopular Vor, I suppose, but not... not the way you're describing."

"What happens if female Vor marry non-Vor, then?"

"Well... they don't. But if they did, I imagine... he might take her last name; she wouldn't take his, unless she really wanted to, I suppose. But she wouldn't stop being Vor. The most that might happen is that she might... lie, pretend, take his last name and then deny ever having been Vor in the first place. It's completely strange to think about."

"Huh. Vor-ness trumps the patriarchal lines. Except for the part where they don't do it? Not ever? If you have a daughter and she wants to marry the - I don't know, the son of somebody your husband works with who doesn't have a Vor in his name, when she grows up? What happens?"

"I... I don't know."

"I mean, I'd likewise say that outside awarded haut-wife arrangements haut tend not to find love-poems outside the breed, but if they did they wouldn't be marrying them anyway, so it could be very quiet and I wouldn't necessarily hear of it..."

"I haven't ever heard of a Vor woman marrying someone who - wasn't. I suppose it must have happened at some point. It's just so strange."

"Huh. Maybe I'll look it up. Obviously Vor men marry non-Vor - or at least Vorkosigans do it."

"Yes. That's allowed."

"I would be very annoyed if I had managed to be unallowably married all this time. So are there a lot of Vor lady spinsters or a hugely disparate death rate or just not enough Vorkosiganlike behavior to cause a problem in the ratios?"

"The last one, I think."

"Makes sense."

"If there's a difference in the death rate I'd be astonished if it didn't lean toward the men, especially now that we're not constantly dying in childbirth."

"I suppose so. Although that must depend heavily on the generation, mustn't it? There is not literally constant warfare."

"Yes, but - um. I'm not sure we've ever managed to go an entire generation without a war, until this one."