Book 2 - Chapter 7

The Golden Gates Are Passed

So Tom went on even to the fifth half-year--till he was turned
sixteen--at King's Lorton, while Maggie was growing with a rapidity
which her aunts considered highly reprehensible, at Miss Firniss's
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 Tom's 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 isn't my fault; _I_ don't 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 street of St. Ogg's. 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 crook-backed son lived to inherit his father's 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. Sterling by this time had two
additional pupils; for though this gentleman's 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.

As for Tom's school course, it went on with mill-like monotony, his
mind continuing to move with a slow, half-stifled pulse in a medium