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.
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