It is, I admit, an extremely difficult question, but that does not alter the fact that it is being treated in an entirely wrong manner. The boy is told that sexual emotion is wrong; he assumes, therefore, that love to be truly love must be sexless. He draws fine distinctions between love and lust. A decent fellow, he says, would never want to do anything like that with some one for whom he really cared. And nothing happens in the course of his romantic friendship to make him reconsider this opinion. It is probable that his affection will not be returned; and, indeed, why should it be? Under such circumstances it is natural that a big boy should be attracted by a smaller boy because the smaller boy is the nearest approach to the feminine ideal. It would be quite unnatural for a small boy to be attracted by a bigger boy who would be to him as far as possible removed from femininity. The small boy likes the elder boy, is grateful for his kindness to him, is perhaps even mildly fond of him; nothing more. As, therefore, there is no response to the elder boy, it is impossible for the natural rhythm of mutually felt emotion to carry them out of the reach of conventional standards, and the friendship is too sacred to the elder boy to allow passage to the itch of sensation; while the small boy, even if he happened to be casual among his contemporaries on such matters, would be restrained by the shyness that he must always feel in the presence of a senior boy and by the inevitable embarrassment at finding himself the object of an emotion he does not understand. Nothing happens, therefore, to disabuse the conviction that love in its purest form is sexless. As a boy is, however, on the whole an amoral creature, he sees no reason why he should not misconduct himself with a person for whom he has no respect. He is not sullying a fine romance. It is a different thing altogether; this is a thing of sensation. A bachelor refrains from prostitutes more often through fear of illness than through reverence for a moral code. There is at school a type that corresponds to the prostitute from whom boys refrain, when they do refrain, for many mixed reasons, of which fear of expulsion is generally not one. Boys are not afraid of punishments, nor do they think that a punishable offence is necessarily a moral offence. That point must always be kept in mind. Punishments to a boy's mind are part of the game that is played between him and authority. The boy has his own scale of values. He would think an immoral act highly reprehensible if he were at the time engaged in a romantic friendship, but he could square his conscience to it if he happened to be emotionally free.