ts 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 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 m