This is the haunting story of a young girl in flight from her impoverished childhood. To ten year old Sonia Marburg, the gold dome of Boston's State House shines as a promise of escape from the burden of substituting for a deranged mother as a chambermaid in an aging hotel across the bay. Her father's desertion serves to trigger her introduction to Beacon Hill, and her coming to terms with the healing of an empty decadent society provides a compassionate unfolding of a human pilgrimage and a brilliant satire of modern life.