"Your Grace—"
"I am not finished, because if I stop, I shall not start again." He looked at the window rather than at her. "I should like to hire you for one evening. Here. Seven until midnight, the same hours. You would sit in the drawing room and bring your work, since I do not suppose you can sit for five hours with your hands empty any more than I can. You need not entertain me. You need not be clever. I want to find out whether I can be a man in a room with somebody in it for five hours, and I would rather find it out where it does not signify."
The light had almost gone. Down the passage somewhere, a door closed and somebody carried a pail.
"A guinea," he said. "That is not a wage. It is a fee, and I am aware of the difference. You may refuse. If you refuse, the order for my niece's clothes stands exactly as it is, and I will not mention this again to you or to anybody."
Catherine stood very still with her hand on the cold table. She thought about the sixpence on the corner of the washstand, and about a man who had counted the doors at the Michaelmas assembly. She thought, unwillingly, about a needle going brown in an unfinished piece of white work ten feet away.
"You have said what it is not," she said. "May I ask what it is? Am I to be a lady in your drawing room, Your Grace?"
"No."
"Then what?"
"A person," he said. "There is the difficulty. I have not had one in a room since June of last year. There has been staff, and my brother's child, and men about drains. I do not know whether the fault is in the house or in me, and I cannot find out alone."
"And if you find that it is in you?"
"Then I shall know it by midnight on a Thursday," he said, "instead of on the eighteenth in front of a gentleman from London with my brother's daughter asleep upstairs."
Catherine looked at him for a long moment. "Thursday, then," she said.
Mrs. Locksley did not shout. That was somehow worse.
"A guinea," she said. "For an evening sitting with my work."