It is hard to know exactly how important a part these friendships play in the life of a boy. It has often been said that the novelist falsifies life by writing too much about love, that except at certain periods of a man's life love occupies only a small part of his attention; he is caught up by other interests. This argument, however, is no sounder than the objection raised by an old lady against the number of nudes displayed at the Paris Salon. 'It's so absurd,' she said, 'one-half of these portraits are nudes, and think how small a part of our life we spend without any clothes on.' A beautiful woman is most beautiful when she is naked, and a man's life is most interesting when he is in love. The condensation and indeed the actual elimination of whole periods must in a novel always falsify life for those who demand a direct transcription of it. If you were to record one average day of a man's life on gramophone and cinema and exhibit the result at the Alhambra you would empty the theatre in an hour. A story-teller recounts only what is of interest. He is a good or a bad story-teller according to the degree of his ability to discern what is, and what is not, of interest. He merely indicates the passage of the unimportant. The man, therefore, who draws direct conclusions from a school story, would imagine that a schoolboy spends his entire time in form ragging masters, and, when not ragging, in cribbing, and that the rest of his time is divided between the fierce rivalries of the football field and the intrigues of romantic friendships. Such, it is needless to say, is not the case. The story-teller has only written of what seemed to him to be of interest. He has omitted, and he has expected his reader to realise out of his own experience that he has omitted, the long, tedious hours of good behaviour, the ordered harmony of routine.