“My first initiation into the mysteries of sex was at the hands of the dormitory servant, who showed me his penis when he woke me in the mornings, and masturbated me when he gave me my hot bath on a Saturday night.  This old reprobate of 45 committed the act of fellatio with most of the boys in turn as he went the dormitory rounds.  For the older lads I cannot speak, but over us younger ones of 14 and 15 he exercised a sort of unholy terror and fascination.  He was very popular; we came to him like doves to a snake.  When I revisited my old school many years later he was occupying a very responsible position in the college chapel, and I noticed that he wore that expression of sly reverence which I think I can now instantly detect when I see it in a man.

“For the rest the dormitory was boisterous and lewd, and there was a good deal of bullying, which probably did little harm.  My principal recollection now is of the filthy mystery of foul talk, that I neither cared for nor understood.  What I really needed, like all the other boys, was a little timely help over the sexual problems, but this we none of us got, and each had to work out his own principle of conduct for himself.  It was a long, difficult, and wasteful process, and I cannot but believe that many of us failed in the endeavor.  We had come unprepared with any advice.  The principle upon which we were apparently trained was the repression of every instinct.  My mother was ignorant from innocence, my father from indifference, and so between them I was sent out helpless.  A mother incurs great responsibility in sending her child away unprepared.  A parent should not seek to shift his responsibility upon the schoolmaster.  Love alone should be the fount from which revelations should flow; the master, from the very nature of his position, cannot reveal.

“An imminent breakdown in health—­due, it would now appear, to quite obvious causes—­relieved me from the purgatory of the college dormitory, and I was removed to one of the private houses.  These establishments were considered more select and less ‘rough.’  The social atmosphere was, however, perhaps more unwholesome, because more effeminate, and was full of noble young sucklings.  The nominal head of the house under normal conditions might have been a real leader; as it was, the real head of the house was a gilded young pariah, fairly low down in the school and full of hypocrisy and unnatural lusts.  The boy who occupied the cubicle next to mine was also a bad case of sexual misdirection, though he had not the social distinction to make him quite so refined a terror.  I had every opportunity of watching him until, two years later, he was fortunately asked to leave.  He talked bawd from morning till night, got drunk on one or two occasions, masturbated constantly without