"I'm glad!"

"He's so cute."

"He did seem charming, from what I saw of him."

"...He's very good at it," says Ekaterin.

"It sounds it!"

"How did you and your husband meet?" wonders Linya.

"Oh - he knew my father, and my father arranged us."

"Is that commonplace here?"

"Among the Vor, yes. Although I think it's getting less so. My father is a little old-fashioned."

"Does it tend to work out reasonably well? I'm gathering that unlike the awarding of haut-wives, where it's entirely possible for the pair in question to barely interact, there remains an expectation for arranged marriages under other circumstances that they be - marriagelike."

"It's... it's all right. We're not forced to marry, if we don't like each other - if I'd been put off Tien from the start I could just have declined to say my vows, and not have suffered anything but my father's disappointment. I took my oath of my own will."

"Okay. Well, I suppose it's okay unless your father has particularly disastrous disappointment."

"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."