In order to follow the technique of such relationships, the official point of view towards them has to be understood. The house master on this point finds himself in extreme difficulty. And, indeed, there is no point on which schoolmasters as a whole waver quite so much. They realise, for the most part, that it is natural, if unfortunate, for boys to feel like this. At the same time they have to discountenance such friendships. Where actual misconduct is concerned, they think themselves to be on safe ground. And, as they believe that immorality in schools consists in the main of the corruption of small boys by big boys, they are able to speak with unrestrained violence against the majority of such friendships. They adjure their prefects to suppress at once the least sign of intimacy between a small and a big boy. They, themselves, watch carefully to see whether any of their seniors are evincing an interest in members of the day room. Every one in a school knows that a friendship between two boys of different positions will be viewed seriously by authority. A boy is given to understand that the romantic emotion he feels for a smaller boy is an emotion that is unworthy of him and of its object, and should consequently be suppressed. Such teaching is absolutely wrong. The emotions that a boy has for a smaller boy are as natural as those that he would feel for a girl were he not restrained by an unnatural system. It is wrong to make a boy say to himself: 'I ought not to feel like this.' Such teaching is responsible for many of the mistakes that a boy will make when he becomes a man; it arbitrarily defines the form which the romantic friendship takes. A boy is surprised by a new, delightful, interesting emotion. He feels strangely happy. Under its inspiration he works better and plays his games harder. He is told it is wrong to feel as he is feeling. But that he cannot believe. The emotions that are condemned in the pulpit and in confirmation addresses must in their essentials be different from those that he is feeling. That must be lust, the mere desire for sensation. This, on the other hand, is love. And so the public school boy of sixteen makes the discovery that love is in its highest form unphysical. The truth of this intuition is established for him by public opinion and by the course of his own experience. The slightest suggestion of indecent conduct between the big and the small boy is regarded by boys as well as masters as the unforgivable offence.