When Dolly was seventeen, a pink wild rose just unrolling its

petals, a very great event occurred in her history. She received

an invitation to go and stop with some friends in the country.

The poor child's life had been in a sense so uneventful that the

bare prospect of this visit filled her soul beforehand with

tremulous anticipation. To be sure, Dolly Barton had always lived

in the midmost centre of the Movement in London; she had known

authors, artists, socialists, the cream of our race; she had been

brought up in close intercourse with the men and women who are

engaged in revolutionizing and remodelling humanity. But this very

fact that she had always lived in the Thick of Things made a change

to the Thin of Things only by so much the more delicious and

enchanting. Not that Dolores had not seen a great deal, too, of

the country. Poor as they were, her mother had taken her to cheap

little seaside nooks for a week or two of each summer; she had made

pilgrimages almost every Sunday in spring or autumn to Leith Hill

or Mapledurham; she had even strained her scanty resources to the

utmost to afford Dolly an occasional outing in the Ardennes or in

Normandy. But what gave supreme importance to this coming visit

was the special fact that Dolly was now for the first time in her

life to find herself "in society."

Among the friends she had picked up at her Marylebone day-school

were two west-country girls, private boarders of the

head-mistress's, who came from the neighborhood of Combe Neville in

Dorset. Their name was Compson, and their father was rector of their

native village, Upcombe. Dolly liked them very much, and was proud

of their acquaintance, because they were reckoned about the most

distinguished pupils in the school, their mother being the niece of

a local viscount. Among girls in middle-class London sets, even so

remote a connection with the title-bearing classes is counted for a

distinction. So when Winnie Compson asked Dolly to go and stop with

her at her father's rectory during three whole weeks of the summer

holidays, Dolly felt that now at last by pure force of native worth

she was rising to her natural position in society. It flattered her

that Winnie should select her for such an honor.

The preparations for that visit cost Dolly some weeks of thought

and effort. The occasion demanded it. She was afraid she had no

frocks good enough for such a grand house as the Compsons.

"Grand" was indeed a favorite epithet of Dolly's; she applied it

impartially to everything which had to do, as she conceived, with

the life of the propertied and privileged classes. It was a word

at once of cherished and revered meaning--the shibboleth of

her religion. It implied to her mind something remote and

unapproachable, yet to be earnestly striven after with all the

forces at her disposal. Even Herminia herself stretched a point in

favor of an occasion which she could plainly see Dolly regarded as

so important; she managed to indulge her darling in a couple of

dainty new afternoon dresses, which touched for her soul the very

utmost verge of allowable luxury. The materials were oriental; the

cut was the dressmaker's--not home-built, as usual. Dolly looked

so brave in them, with her rich chestnut hair and her creamy

complexion,--a touch, Herminia thought, of her Italian birthplace,--

that the mother's full heart leapt up to look at her. It almost

made Herminia wish she was rich--and anti-social, like the rich

people--in order that she might be able to do ample justice to the

exquisite grace of Dolly's unfolding figure. Tall, lissome,

supple, clear of limb and light of footstep, she was indeed a girl

any mother might have been proud of.




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