Read A Matter of Class for Free Online

vaulted out of the carriage and offered his hand to help her down. Then he hugged her tightly.
    â€œMa,” he said, “why would I do that? If I ever do, you may clip me about the head, not weep.”
    She took his father’s arm and looked apprehensively toward the house. She appeared to have shrunk to half her size since they left home, whereas his father seemed to have expanded to twice his. All of his thunderous ill-humor of two days ago had fled without a trace. Reggie took a deep breath and expelled it slowly. This was it, then. A liveried footman, complete with white wig rolled crisply at the sides, was holding open the door of the mansion where Reggie’s doom was to be sealed.
    They were soon in pursuit of the stiff back of the Havercroft butler, who led them up a broad, impressive
staircase to the drawing room. This, Reggie thought as the butler announced them and stood aside, must be the very depth of degradation for Havercroft. The drawing room, no less, for his enemy the coal merchant and his family!
    There were three people in the room, all of them on their feet or in the process of rising. The earl stood before the cold marble fireplace, his feet slightly apart, his hands clasped at his back, his thin face looking haughty and aristocratic and beaked. He looked as if it might have taken wild horses to drag him there, though he was immaculately turned out, as always. The countess was slender and handsome and smiling. It was a gracious smile rather than a warm one, it was true, and therefore perhaps a little condescending, but it was a smile nonetheless.
    And then there was Lady Annabelle, who was tricked out for the occasion in white muslin, which almost exactly matched her complexion. Her very blond hair, arranged in elaborate curls about her head and wispy ringlets over her ears, looked almost colorful in comparison. If she had said boo , she might have been mistaken for a ghost and they might all have run screaming from the room. Her face wore no smile, gracious
or otherwise. Nor any other expression. She gazed straight ahead at nothing in particular.
    Dash it all, she looked as if she had been suffering . As no doubt she had.
    The sound of Reggie’s father rubbing his large hands together was loud in the room for a moment after the butler had finished saying his piece and had closed the door behind the visitors. And then the countess moved gracefully in their direction, both her hands extended toward them—or rather, toward his mother, at whom her smile was directed.
    â€œMrs. Mason,” she said, “I am delighted you have come too. Mothers are excluded all too often from such happy events as this, and really we ought not to be, ought we, since we are the ones who bore and nurtured our children.”
    â€œExactly what I always say,” Reggie’s mother said, beaming happily as she set her hands in those of the countess and visibly relaxed. “It is even worse when the child is a son, Lady Havercroft. A man always thinks a son is his , just as if he appeared from nowhere one day and a woman just happened to be hovering in the next room waiting to provide milk and be called Ma and otherwise be ignored. I insisted on coming today. ‘Bernie,’ I said
when I knew he and Reginald were coming, ‘I am going too and there is no point in trying to stop me.’”
    She sounded breathless by the time she had finished.
    â€œWomen!” Reggie’s father said genially, looking for confirmation of his good-natured complaint from the earl.
    Havercroft offered no such confirmation, and Reggie’s father set about rubbing his hands together again.
    â€œDo have a seat,” the countess said. “We are pleased to see you, Mr. Mason. And you too, Mr. Reginald Mason.”
    Lady Annabelle Ashton sank back into the seat from which she had risen on their arrival. It was as close to one of the windows as it could be without actually falling out of it to the