A dreadful thing has happened. A boy in my form called Chorlthwaite has been expelled for stealing. He happens to have been in Hallows' house. He was certainly a boy without any moral sense at all. Twice I detected him in the act of "cooking" his marks: the first time I talked to him privately and gave him an imposition long enough (one would have thought) to have brought the lesson home to him; on the second occasion I went to see Hallows about it and he as good as told me that it was my fault for putting temptation in his way by making it possible for the boy to do such a thing. "Trusting to a boy's honour?" he said with an ugly laugh when I tried to explain, "you might just as well trust a bookie with your purse: boys haven't got such a thing. The only way to keep them out of harm's way is never to trust them an inch, that's my way and I've never had a failure yet." He is in a towering rage over this expulsion: he has told the Head Master that the whole blame lies on my shoulders, because I encouraged the boy to come up to my rooms and ransack my cupboards for chocolates and cakes. (I always allow all the boys in my form to do this.) They are not overfed here and several of them are too poor to be able to afford to go often to the tuck-shop. The wind is apt to give one a prodigious appetite, and most boys are only too glad to avail themselves of my offer. I have only just heard that Hallows issued an edict that no boy in his house was to come to my rooms under any pretext except with a signed order from him. Chorlthwaite revenged himself by helping himself lavishly from the cupboards of Benson, the assistant music master. It is all frightfully depressing. In my Divinity lessons on Sundays and Mondays I have always tried to put before my boys a rigid code of moral ethics and I had hoped that I was meeting with some success. I trusted them all in everything: I always make a point of letting them give up their own marks and, except in the case of Chorlthwaite, I have never detected a boy in the act of cheating; neither have I come across a single case of cribbing, but there would be little point in that because a boy only cribs through fear of punishment and I punish so rarely that I have even been told by the Head Master that I am unduly lax. Anyway the boy has gone and I am abased and ashamed. I hope that this sort of thing won't happen often or it will wreck all my happiness. If my influence isn't good enough to keep my boys straight it were better for me and for them that I should become a street scavenger or a coal-heaver. All the same I am not sure that expulsion meets the case. What is to happen to Chorlthwaite in the future? Is he to be branded for life? He had the elements of a Christian in him. I cannot think that his power for evil was strong enough to make him a bad influence over his fellows: their united good influence, on the other hand, would, I should have thought, in time have changed his perverted sense of morality.