"The gist is that people write up what they want in a partner and what they would be like as a partner and then a central - clearinghouse - tentatively matches them up and they meet and see how they like what they've matched with. The requirement to get literally everybody married to somebody without the option to keep sending them back to try again to improve as people is a hiccup though."

"It is not required to find a match your first season, though it is by your third. It's also common for parents to involve themselves in matchmaking, and there is certainly a lot of everyone trying to know about everyone else, but I suppose a centralized system could be much more efficient and avoid the failures of gossip as a source of information. How do you guard against the clearinghouse taking advantage of their position?"

"Well, in my time you do it by the clearinghouse not being a person, but what kind of advantage do you mean?"

"I imagine that they might be inclined to make particularly favorable matches for their allies and friends and unfavorable ones for their enemies. What other than a person would you use?"

"Computers. The way to prevent that would be to have disinterested parties forbidden from taking bribes but if you've got supervillains going around threatening people for far less reason that might work less well."

"I also don't think there are any entirely disinterested parties?"

"No? You couldn't, say, have the French handle yours and you handle theirs?"

"There exists a number of families with connections to both."

"The... Icelanders, or something. I don't know."

"Hrm, they are certainly better - though I suspect they would still have opinions about England that would align with some families but not others, and people would find excuses to visit and get to know Iceland if they were handed such power. You'd be an unusually good choice were you not associated with me, though even then you'd still have to convince enough families that you were preferable to their current situation, which would be extremely difficult."

"I don't think I have any particular gifts of matchmaking, alas. I think a partial implementation could still work, though, some standard questionnaire people think over before they attend courting events and compare answers to."

"With what sort of questions?"

"Uh, standard questions would have to be pretty different from what I'd expect on my world, I assume there is less diversity in things like what religion people are and whether they want kids. Or, well, whether it matters if they want kids. Things like - values and lifestyle preferences, though."

"I expect a lot of people would be trying to give the answer they thought was the correct one rather than the one that was true for them.... well, Sophie might be an exception but most people aren't like her and it's possible her mother would intervene and insist on different answers than the ones she would normally give."

"Well, I guess what you'd want is for it to be confidential - do you have confessionals here -"

"Yes, though to a lesser degree than before the Dark Agees, I believe. I think it's not just the confidentiality - it's that people would expect that giving the right answers would result in a better match than giving the honest ones."

"I wonder if you could get anywhere with something like - if someone's answers are too perfect, we throw them out, so they have to give at least a few answers that are not maximally desirable - this assumes there's an objective most desirable slate of answers - and then they might as well choose the ones that are most important to them to answer undesirably instead."

"We might have to be clever about what the questions are to achieve that, but it could work..."

"I'm considering how we might go about hosting an event that incorporated such an activity. Probably the specific premise would be well described as a Narnian tradition, though given that you'll be using my resources to host it you should first aid in an event by some other young lady, so as not to be seen as favoring me."

"Lady Brynd was fine, is she putting anything on? No other young ladies made much of an impression on me."

"I expect there will be some event, though I'm not entirely certain how much of the organizing will be her rather than her mother. Probably some will still be her."

"You have any other friends who do their own organizing to recommend me?"

"None as dear as Sophie."

"I'm not all that personally interested in the weather in and of itself but the presence of any genuine personality traits in that room was striking."

"I believe Lord Metcalfe may also meet that standard. Unfortunately so, given his personality."

"He also, uh, struck me."