One day, however, when with the head-mistress gazing at a beautiful landscape, I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness and burst out crying.  The head-mistress inquired what was the matter, and throwing myself in her arms I sobbed:  ’I love her, and I shall die if she leaves off loving me!’ She smiled, and the smile went through my heart.  I saw at once how silly I was, and what a wrong road my companion was on.  From that day I could no longer endure my ‘flame.’  The separation was absolute; I courageously bore bites and insults, even scratches on my face, followed by long complaints and complete prostration.  I thought it would be mean to accuse her, but I invented a pretext for having the number of my bed changed.  This was because she would dress quietly and come to pass hours by my bed, resting her head on the pillow.  She said she wished to smell the perfume of my health and freshness.  This continual turbulent desire had now nauseated me, and I wished to avoid it altogether.  Later I heard that she had formed a relationship which was not blessed by any sacred rite.”

Notwithstanding the Platonic character of the correspondences, Obici and Marchesini remark, there is really a substratum of emotional sexuality beneath it, and it is this which finds its expression in the indecorous conversations already referred to.  The “flame” is a love-fiction, a play of sexual love.  This characteristic comes out in the frequently romantic names, of men and women, invented to sign the letters.

Even in the letters themselves, however, the element of sexual impressionability may be traced.  “On Friday we went to a service at San B.,” writes one who was in an institution directed by nuns, “but unfortunately I saw M.L. at a window when I thought she was at A. and I was in a nervous state the whole time.  Imagine that that dear woman was at the window with bare arms, and, as it seemed to me, in her chemise.”  No doubt a similar impression might have been made on a girl living in her own family.  But it is certain that the imaginative coloring tends to be more lively in those living in colleges and shut off from that varied and innocent observation which renders those outside colleges freer and more unprejudiced.  On a boy who is free to see as many women as he chooses a woman’s face cannot make such an impression as on a boy who lives in a college and who is liable to be, as it were, electrified if he sees any object belonging to a woman, especially if he sees it by stealth or during a mood of erotism.  Such an object calls out a whole series of wanton imaginations, which it could not do in one who, by his environment, was already armed against any tendencies to erotic fetichism.  The attraction exerted by that which we see but seldom, and around which fancy assiduously plays, the attraction of forbidden fruit, produces tendencies and habits which could scarcely develop in freedom.  Curiosity is acute, and is augmented by the obstacles which stand in the way of