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 revolutionising 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 neighbourhood 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 honour.