mfortable to the end. That he was
still fit, as Mrs. Lessing's transparent efforts to marry him to her
friends guaranteed him to be, he felt was owing greatly to the terms on
which Clarice had admitted him to the adventure of bringing up a family.
That a special fitness was required for admission to Mrs. Lessing's
circle he would have guessed even without the aid of print which
consistently described it as Our Best Society, for it was a Best
attested to by all the marks by which Clarice herself expressed the
essential fineness of things.

One couldn't have told, from anything that appeared on the surface of
the Lessing's social environment, that life did not proceed there as it
did between Clarice and the Weatherals, by means of its subtler
sympathies, and proceed, at least so far as the women were concerned, on
a still higher plane of grace and harmony. It moved about her table and
across the lawns of Lessing's handsome country place, with such
soundless ease and perfection as it had glided for Peter through the
House with the Shining Walls. Or at least so it had seemed on those
occasions during the last few years when he had found himself wondrously
inside it.

It had been accepted by Ellen on the mere certainty of Clarice's mother
having been one of the Thatcher Inwoods, that Clarice should enlarge
her social borders with Lessing's increasing means until they included
people among whom Ellen would have been miserably shy and out of tune.
But not Ellen herself guessed how much of Peter's admission to its
inaccessibility was owing to the returns from hardly snatched options
and long-nursed opportunities, coming in in checks of six figures.
Perhaps Clarice herself never knew. It was one of the things that went
with being a Thatcher Inwood, wherever an occasion presented a handle of
nobility, to seize by that and maintain it in the face of any contingent
smallness. Clarice wouldn't have introduced Peter to her friends if he
hadn't been fit, and it was part of the social creed of women like
Clarice Lessing, which takes almost the authority of religion, that he
wouldn't have been in a position to be introduced if he hadn't been fit.
So it had happened for the past two years that Peter had found himself
skirting the fringe of Best Society, and identifying it with the life he
had lived so long, sitting with his book open on his knees in their
little flat, with Ellen across the fire from him knitting white things
for Julian