concealment, had several of the younger boys inter femora, though without evincing any care or affection for them, and gave one the impression of having been born for a brothel.  His one redeeming quality was an element of good nature:  a characteristic one often finds among such as are selfish and irresponsible.  I have since been told that he has gone completely to the dogs.  Whether this young cub’s sexual instincts could have been turned or guided I do not know; but in a rougher and simpler life than that of a public school, in a more open and less hypocritical atmosphere, he might, perhaps, have been licked into better shape.  Hypocrisy is a vice, however, that schoolboys themselves are fortunately free from.  It comes later.  The tone among the boys was frankly and violently unclean, though unclean not from instinct, but from want of direction and from repression.

“I have not a single happy recollection of this period of my school life.  Yet out of this morass of misbegotten virtues I plucked my first blossom of genuine affection.  I call it a blossom because it never ripened even to flower.  I had been given the extreme of filth to feed upon at the outset, and now I found for myself the extreme of chastity.  It will be a matter of lifelong regret to me that the love which was the lodestar of my school years was never fulfilled or set upon a sound basis of comradeship.

“When I was about 161/2 years old there came into the house a boy about two years younger than myself, and who became the absorbing thought of my school days.  I do not remember a moment, from the time I first saw him to the time I left school, that I was not in love with him, and the affection was reciprocated, if somewhat reservedly.  He was always a little ahead of me in books and scholarship, but as our affection ripened we spent most of our spare time together, and he received my advances much as a girl who is being wooed, a little mockingly, perhaps, but with real pleasure.  He allowed me to fondle and caress him, but our intimacy never went further than a kiss, and about that even was the slur of shame; there was always a barrier between us, and we never so much as whispered to one another concerning those things of which all the school obscenely talked.  Any connection between our own emotions and the sexual morals of the school never occurred to us.  In fact, we lived a dream-life of chastity that could not relate itself to any human conditions.  This was suddenly broken in upon.  My friend was very beautiful and an object of attraction to others.  That some of the elder boys had made offers of sexual intercourse to him I knew, but to him, as to me, that was unspeakable wickedness.  One day I heard that four or five of these suitors of his had mishandled him; they had, I believe, taken off his trousers and attempted to masturbate him.  The offense was probably horse play of an animal nature; to me it seemed an unpardonable