A Client of Unpromising Manner

Miss Augusta Pringle had arranged forty-one marriages, and she could tell within a quarter of an hour of meeting a new client precisely how much trouble he was going to be. Mr. Edmund Castle, she decided, watching him fold his considerable height into the small chair on the other side of her desk, was going to be a very great deal of trouble indeed. He had arrived without an appointment, which she disliked. He had declined tea, which she found suspicious in a man, tea being the natural medium through which sensible business was conducted. And he had opened the interview by saying, "I am told, Miss Pringle, that you are efficient. I require efficiency. I do not require sentiment, of which I am informed your trade has rather too much, and I would be obliged if we might dispense with it at the outset." Augusta set down her pen. She had been a matchmaker for nineteen years, and one did not survive nineteen years in the business of human hearts without developing a serviceable armour, and she settled into hers now with something close to pleasure. "Mr. Castle," she said. "You have come to a matrimonial agency. Sentiment is not an unfortunate by-product of my trade. It is the trade. It is rather as if you had come to a bakery and requested that we dispense, at the outset, with the flour." A muscle moved in his jaw. He was not a handsome man, exactly — too severe for handsome, too plainly tired about the eyes — but he had the kind of face that Augusta, professionally, knew how to place: a face that had been pleasant once and had had the pleasantness worn off it by some particular grief. She had matched a great many such faces. They were, in her experience, the most rewarding work, because the pleasantness was generally still in there somewhere, merely waiting for a reason. "I am a barrister," Mr. Castle said, as though that explained the absence of flour. "I am also, since two years past, a widower. I have three children — a boy of nine, and two girls, seven and four — and I have discovered that a man may be entirely competent in the courts of law and entirely useless in the matter of plaiting a small girl's hair before church. My household is run by a housekeeper who is excellent but elderly, and a governess who has given notice three times this year. My children require a mother. I require, therefore, a wife. I do not require to be in love with her, and I would consider it a great convenience if she did not expect to be in love with me. I require a sensible, kind, capable woman who will take my children to her heart and run my house with competence. That is the commission. You will see that sentiment does not enter into it." Augusta looked at him for a long moment. She had, over nineteen years, heard a great many versions of this speech. Men were forever arriving at her desk armoured in the word *sensible*, requesting a marriage of convenience, a tidy arrangement, a wife the way one engaged a steward. And Augusta had learned a thing about that speech which the men who delivered it never knew they were revealing. A man who genuinely wanted nothing but a competent housekeeper did not come to a matrimonial agency. He hired a competent housekeeper. There were agencies for that, cheaper ones, and Mr. Castle, being a barrister, would know it. A man came to *her* — to a matchmaker, to the flour and the sentiment — when some part of him, generally a part he had not been introduced to in some years, wanted more than he was prepared to say aloud across a desk. "You require a sensible, kind, capable woman," Augusta repeated. "Who will take three grieving children to her heart. Mr. Castle, I must tell you, as a professional courtesy, that you have just described a woman it is entirely impossible to love sensibly. A woman who takes three children to her heart has a heart of considerable size and warmth, and a man who lives in a house with such a heart for any length of time will find — I have seen it forty-one times — that the arrangement does not stay an arrangement. It never does. It is the most reliable thing in my trade." Mr. Castle's severe face did something complicated. "Then I shall require," he said, after a pause that lasted slightly too long, "a woman warm enough for the children and sensible enough not to expect the rest. Surely your books contain such a person." "My books," said Augusta Pringle, drawing a fresh sheet toward her and uncapping her pen, because forty-one marriages had taught her exactly when a difficult client had become an interesting one, "contain a great many people, Mr. Castle. But I begin to suspect that the most difficult match on them is going to be yours — and I confess, I have not had a properly difficult one in some while, and I find I am quite looking forward to it. Now. Sit back. Have the tea after all. And tell me about your children, every detail, because that, and not your speech about flour, is where this commission truly begins."