He did not know what she was going to say, but somehow…
He knew…
It mattered.
Maybe more than anything else he’d ever heard.
“You don’t wish to ask for help,” his mother said, “because it is so important to you that your brothers see you as a man grown. And yet at the same time…Well, life has come easily to you, and so I think sometimes you don’t try.”
His lips parted.
“It is not that you refuse to try,” she hastened to add. “Just that most of the time you don’t have to. And when something is going to require too much effort…If it is something you cannot manage yourself, you decide that it is not worth the bother.”
Gregory found his eyes pulling back toward that spot on the wall, the one where the vine twisted so curiously. “I know what it means to work for something,” he said in a quiet voice. He turned to her then, looking her full in the face. “To want it desperately and to know that it might not be yours.”
“Do you? I’m glad.” She reached for her tea, then apparently changed her mind and looked up. “Did you get it?”
“No.”
Her eyes turned a little bit sad. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” he said stiffly. “Not any longer.”
“Oh. Well.” She shifted in her seat. “Then I am not sorry. I imagine you are a better man for it now.”
Gregory’s initial impulse leaned toward offense, but to his great surprise, he found himself saying, “I believe you are correct.”
To his even greater surprise, he meant it.
His mother smiled wisely. “I am so glad you are able to see it in that light. Most men cannot.” She glanced up at the clock and let out a chirp of surprise. “Oh dear, the time. I promised Portia Featherington that I would call upon her this afternoon.”
Gregory stood as his mother rose to her feet.
“Do not worry about Lady Lucinda,” she said, hurrying to the door. “I shall take care of everything. And please, finish your tea. I do worry about you, living all by yourself with no woman to care for you. Another year of this, and you will waste away to skin and bones.?
?
He walked her to the door. “As nudges toward matrimony go, that was particularly unsubtle.”
“Was it?” She gave him an arch look. “How nice for me that I no longer even try for subtlety. I have found that most men do not notice anything that is not clearly spelled out, anyway.”
“Even your sons.”
“Especially my sons.”
He smiled wryly. “I asked for that, didn’t I?”
“You practically wrote me an invitation.”
He tried to accompany her to the main hall, but she shooed him away. “No, no, that’s not necessary. Go and finish your tea. I asked the kitchen to bring up sandwiches when you were announced. They should arrive at any moment and will surely go to waste if you don’t eat them.”
Gregory’s stomach grumbled at that exact moment, so he bowed and said, “You are a superb mother, did you know that?”
“Because I feed you?”
“Well, yes, but perhaps for a few other things as well.”
She stood on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. “You are no longer my darling boy, are you?”