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.