_Your delightful sister_,

_Stella_.

"I wonder if she ought to write like that," said Michael to himself.
"Oh, well, I don't see why she shouldn't."

Certainly as one grew older a sister became a most valuable property.

Chapter XVIII: _Eighteen Years Old_

To Michael it seemed almost incredible that school should be able to
continue as the great background against which his love stood out like a
delicate scene carved by the artist's caprice in an obscure corner of a
strenuous and heroic decoration. Michael was hardly less conscious of
school on Lily's account, and in class he dreamed neither more nor less
than formerly; but his dreams partook more of ecstasy than those
nebulous pictures inspired by the ambitions and ideals and books of
youth's progress. Nevertheless in the most ultimate refinement of
meditation school weighed down his spirit. It is true that games had
finally departed from the realm of his consideration, but equally with
games much extravagance of intellect and many morbid pleasures had gone
out of cultivation. Balancing loss with gain, he found himself at the
close of his last autumn term with a surer foothold on the rock-hewn
foundations of truth.

Michael called truth whatever of emotion or action or reaction or reason
or contemplation survived the destruction he was dealing out to the
litter of idols that were beginning to encumber his passage, many of
which he thought he had already destroyed when he had merely covered
them with a new coat of gilt. During this period he began to enjoy
Wordsworth, to whom he came by way of Matthew Arnold, like a wayfarer
who crosses green fields and finds that mountains are faint upon the
horizon. A successful lover, as he called himself, he began to despise
anything in his reading of poetry that could not measure its power with
the great commonplaces of human thought.

The Christmas holidays came as a relief from the burden of spending so
much of his time in an atmosphere from which he was sure he had drained
the last draught of health-giving breath. Michael no longer regarded,
save in a contemptuous aside, the microcosm of school; the pleasures of
seniority had staled; the whole business was now a tedious sort of
mental quarantine. If he had not had Lily to occupy his leisure, he
would have expired of restless inanition; and he wondered that the world
went on allowing youth's load of education to be encumbered by a
dead-weight of superf