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's children.

But the idea that having come into this neighbourhood of fine appreciations he was to take up his home and live there, opened more slowly.

It required more than one of Clarice's swift hummingbird darts, more than the flutter of suggestion to brush its petals awake for him.
It lay so deep under all the years, the power of loving.

He knew almost nothing about it except that he had had it once, and that marriage without it would be unthinkable, even such a marriage as Mrs.Lessing had let him see was now possible to him.