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.
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