I have said that the romantic friendship is the natural growth of an unnatural system; but even a natural growth develops soon or late, according to the soil in which it is planted and the climate by which it is nourished. The presence of boys of 18 to 19, by their example, force this growth like a hot-house atmosphere. In a boy of eighteen the sexual impulse has become defined. He understands the implications of its symptoms. He is old enough to be married. But the boy of sixteen is not so sure of himself. In him the impulse is wavering and undetermined. He does not understand the nature of the emotions that are moving him. And he only comes to understand it through the example of elder boys. If a boy were told nothing of the existence of romantic friendships, of their technique, of the complicated moral code that allows this and denies that, if his curiosity were not continually quickened by stray references in sermons and addresses, I believe that he would not, at the age of seventeen, have realised that the friendship he felt for a smaller boy was essentially different from that which he was feeling for his contemporaries. It would be a deeper, an intenser friendship, but he would not see that it possessed a different nature. Why should he? The schoolboy has read _The Hill_. He expects every Verney to find a Desmond. So much has been written about the lasting friendships of school life. Every boy must have his 'special friend.' Why should he be any different from his fellows? There would be moments when he might wish to caress his friend, but he would immediately smother such a wish, feeling it to be foolish, girlish, unworthy of him. He would be too young, he would not have the intellectual independence to be able to say to himself: 'This is what I want. And what I want is natural to me. Damn anything else!' Shadowy imaginings would haunt his reveries, but they would never become defined in action. For a boy of eighteen it is different. His impulses are strong; he knows now exactly what he wants. And he is prepared to get what he wants. He knows that the emotions he feels for a small boy are of a different nature altogether from the friendship that he feels for his contemporaries, and the fact that there are boys in the school old enough to have defined these emotions, provides a hot-house atmosphere for the development of younger boys.