The Golden Gates Are Passed

SO Tom went on even to the fifth half year - till he was turned sixteen - at Kings Lorton, while Maggie was growing, with a rapidity which her aunts considered highly reprehensible, at Miss Firnisss boarding school in the ancient town of Laceham on the Floss, with cousin Lucy for her companion. In her early letters to Tom she had always sent her love to Philip and asked many questions about him which were answered by brief sentences about Toms toothache, and a turf-house which he was helping to build in the garden, with other items of that kind. She was pained to hear Tom say in the holidays that Philip was as queer as ever again, and often cross: they were no longer very good friends, she perceived, and when she reminded Tom that he ought always to love Philip for being so good to him when his foot was bad, he answered, `Well, it isnt my fault: I dont do anything to him. She hardly ever saw Philip during the remainder of their school life: in the Midsummer holidays he was always away at the seaside, and at Christmas she could only meet him at long intervals in the streets of St Oggs. When they did meet, she remembered her promise to kiss him, but, as a young lady who had been at a boarding-school, she knew now that such a greeting was out of the question, and Philip would not expect it. The promise was void like so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood: void as promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach - impossible to be fulfilled when the golden gates had been passed. But when their father was actually engaged in the long-threatened lawsuit, and Wakem, as the agent at once of Pivart and Old Harry, was acting against him, even Maggie felt, with some sadness, that they were not likely ever to have any intimacy with Philip again: the very name of Wakem made her father angry, and she had once heard him say that if that crookbacked son lived to inherit his fathers ill-gotten gains, there would be a curse upon him. `Have as little to do with him at school as you can, my lad, he said to Tom; and the command was obeyed the more easily because Mr Stelling by this time had two additional pupils; for though this gentlemans rise in the world was not of that meteor-like rapidity which the admirers of his extemporaneous eloquence had expected for a preacher whose voice demanded so wide a sphere, he had yet enough of growing prosperity to enable him to increase his expenditure in continued disproportion to his income.

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