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."