impossible to omit all reference to it in a detailed study such as this, and, if it is impossible to avoid mention of it, it is fatal to content oneself, as one may very well do in a novel, with stray suggestions and inferences. A novel is an abstraction. One compresses into a few pages the action of several years, so that one has to suggest rather than to state. One can withhold one's own opinion, one is under no compunction to generalise from the incidents one selects. One is telling a story or interpreting a personality. Only rarely is one constructing a thesis. In a novel it is not difficult to deal with the moral question. Most good school stories have touched more or less indirectly on some side of it. Ivor Brown and Compton Mackenzie have both dealt subtly with an intricate relationship. Hugh Walpole, if less originally, faced the same situation more courageously, while Arnold Lunn in _Loose Ends_ has interpreted the boy as opposed to the official attitude to this issue with extreme effectiveness. The novelist is constrained to discuss only that part of the question that affects the action of the story. That is one of the great charms of story-telling: one can touch lightly without need of explanation on the most delicate situations. One can say only as much as one wants to say, and say it, what is more, obliquely. In a book such as this, however, one must deal with the subject thoroughly if at all. One must tackle every side of it. One is bound to follow one's thought through to the end. And that is a thing that no one cares to do in public. It was said of a certain intrepid Rugby player that he had not the brains to be afraid. It is certainly true that many soldiers lost their nerve after they had been once wounded, and that few soldiers were really frightened till they had seen what a shell could do; it may well be that at twenty-three one has not sufficient experience of the world to realise what risks one runs through honesty. The first difficulty, especially for those who, without having been to a Public School themselves, are the fathers of present or prospective public school boys, is to start investigations with a clear mind. This feat the majority never manage to accomplish. For the moral question in schools is concerned with the relationship of two members of the same sex. Now such a relationship is counted in the world at large an unmentionable and unforgivable sin. It is regarded with horror by the average man. It is a penal offence. The man who enters into such a relationship is abnormal, and, as such, is considered a menace to society. But the same standards are not applicable to school life.