Nothing, he had long admitted, that he could have purchased for his sister would have been so satisfying as what Clarice contributed, pressing the full cup of her motherhood to Ellen's thirsty lips.

They might have grown sleek, he and Ellen, without exceeding a proper ratio of expenditure, and if in the end they had been a little less rich, they would still have had enough to go on being sleek and comfortable 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.