emote time of which we are speaking, the
private institutions--male PENSIONS and institutes, as well as
academies for cadets--represented some sort of hot-house nurseries. The
care of the mind and morality they tried to entrust as much as possible
to educators who were bureaucrats-formalists; and in addition
impatient, captious, capricious in their sympathies and hysterical,
just like old maid lady teachers. Now it is otherwise. But at that time
the boys were left to themselves. Barely snatched away, speaking
figuratively, from the maternal breast; from the care of devoted
nurses; from morning and evening caresses, quiet and sweet; even though
they were ashamed of every manifestation of tenderness as
"womanishness," they were still irresistibly and sweetly drawn to
kisses, contacts, conversations whispered in the ear.

Of course, attentive, solicitous treatment, bathing, exercises in the
open air--precisely not gymnastics, but voluntary exercises, each to
his own taste--could have always put off the coming of this climacteric
period or soften and make it understandable.

I repeat--then there was nothing of this.

The longing for family endearment, the endearment of mother, sister,
nurse, so roughly and unexpectedly cut short, turned into deformed
forms of courting (every whit like the "crushes" in a female institute)
of good-looking boys, of "fairies"; they loved to whisper in corners
and, walking arm in arm, or embracing in dark corridors, to tell in
each other's ears improbable histories of adventures with women. This
was partly both childhood's need of the fairy-tale element and partly
awakening sensuality as well. Not infrequently some fifteen-year-old
chubby, for whom it was just the proper time to be playing at popular
tennis or to be greedily putting away buckwheat porridge with milk,
would be telling, having read up, of course, on certain cheap novels,
of how every Saturday, now, when it is leave, he goes to a certain,
handsome widow millionairess; and of how she is passionately enamored
of him; and how near their couch always stand fruits and precious wine;
and how furiously and passionately she makes love to him.

Here, by the bye, came along the inevitable run of prolonged reading,
like hard drinking, which, of course, every boy and girl has undergone.
No matter how strict in this respect the class surveillance may be, the
striplings did read, are reading, and will read just that which is not
permitted th