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.

On the day she left London, Herminia thought to herself she had never seen her child look so absolutely lovely. The unwonted union of blue eyes with that olive-gray skin gave a tinge of wayward shyness to her girlish beauty. The golden locks had ripened to nut-brown, but still caught stray gleams of nestling sunlight. \'Twas with a foreboding regret that Herminia kissed Dolly on both peach-bloom cheeks at parting. She almost fancied her child must be slipping from her motherly grasp when she went off so blithely to visit these unknown friends, away down in Dorsetshire. Yet Dolly had so few amusements of the sort young girls require that Herminia was overjoyed this opportunity should have come to her. She reproached herself not a little in her sensitive heart for even feeling sad at Dolly\'s joyous departure. Yet to Dolly it was a delight to escape from the atmosphere of Herminia\'s lodgings. Those calm heights chilled her.

The Compsons\' house was quite as "grand" in the reality as Dolly had imagined it. There was a man-servant in a white tie to wait at table, and the family dressed every evening for dinner. Yet, much to her surprise, Dolly found from the first the grandeur did not in the least incommode her. On the contrary, she enjoyed it. She felt forthwith she was to the manner born. This was clearly the life she was intended by nature to live, and might actually have been living—she, the granddaughter of so grand a man as the late Dean of Dunwich—had it not been for poor Mamma\'s ridiculous fancies. Mamma was so faddy! Before Dolly had spent three whole days at the rectory, she talked just as the Compsons did; she picked up by pure instinct the territorial slang of the county families. One would have thought, to hear her discourse, she had dressed for dinner every night of her life, and passed her days in the society of the beneficed clergy.

But even that did not exhaust the charm of Upcombe for Dolly. For the first time in her life, she saw something of men,—real men, with horses and dogs and guns,—men who went out partridge shooting in the season and rode to hounds across country, not the pale abstractions of cultured humanity who attended the Fabian Society meetings or wrote things called articles in the London papers. Her mother\'s friends wore soft felt hats and limp woollen collars; these real men were richly clad in tweed suits and fine linen. Dolly was charmed with them all, but es............