“It’s just,” she sniffled, doing him an inadvertent favour by not looking at him with her mostly dry eyes. “I feel so terribly lonely all the time and the others are hardly ever around,” which, now she had said it, she knew to be true.

But it wasn’t the entire reason. Whatever else Barney might have been – and she knew the list was long and rarely flattering – he was at least someone and if she intended to have the sort of life she had dreamed of then she would need someone of note in her corner. She was getting old. She needed a husband and Barney was just the idiot that could help her stand out amongst the great and the good.