The Matchmaker by Stella Gibbons Page A

went into the house to read her letters.
    Ronald’s contained more about politics and economics than she really liked; having pursued the Liberal Cause through Greece, North Africa and Italy, on all types of Service stationery stamped with prohibitions in many different languages, Alda was still blithely indifferent to the Liberals (and the Conservatives and the Socialists and the Communists too) unless one of them happened to be ill or hard up under her nose. Then she helped generously, ignoring the sufferer’s political views. Her husband, never ceasing to marvel at her lack of interest in theoretical politics, found her practical charities endearing.
    However, there were loving sentences at the end of both letters, and some jokes about German cats for the children, and he was in a house which had a roof, and the work was “tremendously interesting,” so his letters were, from all points of view, satisfactory.
    The next one was not satisfactory from any point of view except that of the writer.
    It was from the successful and efficient being known to Jenny and Louise as Father’s-Only-Sister-Marion. She was thus distinguished from Mother’s Sisters (who were five in number and naturally known as Auntie Marjorie, Auntie Peggy, Auntie Gwen, Auntie Brenda and Auntie Betty), and was called Marion at her own request. There was some reason, which Alda had never precisely fathomed, why she preferred her own sons and Alda’s daughters to use her Christian name; it prevented complexes being set up or gave a sense of comradeship or something. Her letters were known among Alda’s unmarried sisters as Getting on the Blower or Beefing Again; the married ones with young families viewed her activities more indulgently, for they did not extend to themselves.
    She was busily getting through her second husband; from her first she had parted by amiable mutual consent, and he had left her the custody of two clever little boys. By the second one she had had two more clever little boys and all four (the youngest was six) were doing outstandingly well at school.
    Her chief interest in life was politics, and she had ambitions to play an active part in the political life of Ironborough, but she would also have liked a daughter to mould and influence.
    The spectacle of Alda’s three girls—unconventionally dressed, scholastically backward, and wholly charming—moved her several times a year to sit down and dash off a letter full of suggestions to Ronald or Alda.
    This time, she suggested (after listing the latest triumphs gained by her sons) that Jenny and Louise should be sent to a first-class boarding school with help from herself towards the fees, while Meg was farmed out at a progressive nursery school run by a friend of her own.
    Alda could get a job to help provide the money for these schemes.
    Alda folded up the letter with some irritation. She never attempted to argue with Marion, either verbally or on paper, and took refuge from her attacks in laughter, but it certainly was kind of her to offer to help with fees, and it gave her more right to be listened to.
    For some time Alda herself had known that Ronald was becoming increasingly uneasy about the lack of regular schooling for Jenny and Louise, but circumstances and sheer lack of money had conspired to prevent the laying and carrying out of desirable plans. Alda’s main object, strongly felt rather than thought out, had been to keep the three children with her, among a few cherished possessions that should mean to them Home, and this she had succeeded in doing. She told herself that it had not been possible, until now, to do more. Attendance at a village school for three months here, or a class for six children in some vicarage schoolroom there, was all the education that Louise and Jenny had received since leaving Ironborough.
    She herself was no believer in highly-educated women and she took pleasure in her children’s quaint, original ways. She feared that school might make