And these lessons, which George's temper and her own reason had taught her, remained with her in the future, long after she had forgotten George and the severity of her schooling.
There were many things for her to learn, and the lessons of that first day and night stretched through the winter and well into the beginning of spring.

Accompanying Mrs.Fowler on her busy rounds, she discovered that here also, as in the house in Hill Street, the chief end of life was to keep up an appearance; here also the supreme effort, the best energies, were devoted to a sham--to a thing which had no actual existence.

Though Mrs.Fowler was rich beside Mrs.Carr, Gabriella soon found out that she was not nearly so rich as her neighbours were, not nearly so rich as her position in society exacted that she should be.
She was still not rich enough to be spared the sordid, nerve-racking effort to make two ends meet without a visible break.

Her small economies, to Gabriella's surprise, were as rigid as Mrs.Carr's; and though she lived in surroundings which appeared luxurious to the girl, there was almost as little ready money to spend as there had been in Mrs.Carr's household.

Bills were made recklessly, and dinner parties were given at regular intervals; for Mrs.Fowler, who denied herself a hundred small comforts of living, who gave up cream in her coffee and bought her butter from a grocer below Washington Square, took quite as a matter of course the fact that she must, as she put it, "pay off social scores." Though they ate the simplest food in the market for six days of the week, on the seventh, hothouse flowers bloomed profusely in the lower rooms and champagne flowed abundantly into the delicate Venetian glasses on the round table.