That which above all gilded and glorified these delights, that which was the stem from which their green leaves drew nourishment, was friendship. All these were the foliage that was fed from that stem, though the sun and the clear windy air and the rain fortified and refreshed them and swelled the buds that expanded into flowers. For what man is there, surrounded though he be with the love of wife and children, who does not retain a memory of the romantic affection of boys for each other? Having felt it, he could scarcely have forgotten it, and if he never felt it he missed one of the most golden of the prizes of youth, unrecapturable in mature life. In many ways boys are a sex quite apart from male or female: though they take on much of what they are and of what they learn, strengthened and expanded, into manhood, they leave behind, given that they grow into normal and healthy beings, a certain emotional affection towards the coevals of their own sex which is natural to public-school boyhood, even as it is, though perhaps less robustly, to girlhood. For twelve or thirteen weeks three times a year they live exclusively among boys, and that at a time when their vigour is at its strongest, and it would demand of them a fish-like inhumanity, if they were asked to let their friendships alone have no share of the tremendous high colours in which their lives are dipped. Naturally there is danger about it (for what emotion worth having is not encompassed by perils?) and this strong beat of affection may easily explode into fragments of mere sensuality, be dissipated in mere “smut” and from being a banner in the clean wind be trampled into mud. But promiscuous immorality was, as far as I am aware, quite foreign to the school, though we flamed into a hundred hot bonfires of these friendships, which were discussed with a freedom that would seem appalling, if you forgot that you were dealing with boys and not with men. Blaze after blaze illumined our excited lives, for without being one whit less genuine while they lasted, there was no very permanent quality about these friendships. Your friend or you might get swept into another orbit; diversity of tastes, promotion in school, conflicting interests might sever you, and in all friendliness you passed on, with eyes eager to give or to receive some new shy signal which heralded the approach of another of these genial passions. For me the sentimentality that coloured the choir-boy affair, or that not less misbegotten case of Mrs. Carter had quite faded from my emotional palette, which now was spread with hues far more robust and healthy. My signals were all made for the strong and the masculine, and I quite put out my lights and showed a stony blackness to flutterings from one of mincing walk or elegant gestures or a conjectured softness of disposition. I loved the children of the sun, and the friends of rain and wind, who were swift in the three-quarter line, and played squash with me in the snow; but still, by some strange law of attraction, too regular for coincidence, they were most of them musical, and once more, though now without sentimentality, chapel services, as in the case of the choir-boy and Lincoln Cathedral, were entwined with my volatile but violent affections. One such friend sang tenor and I intrigued my corn-crake way back into the choir in order to sit next him: another led the trebles. He must have been quite two years younger than myself, which is a gulf wider than two decades in mature life. But we bridged it with a structure that carried us safely to each other; there was music in that bridge, and there was the wonder in young eyes of the fact that you had found (and so had he) a passionate pilgrim, voyaging through fives-courts and glades of Savernake, because of whom those external phenomena shone with a new brightness, so that now the sweep of the forest, and the fives-courts, and the mire in the football fields, and the inadequate bounding of balls in an open squash court, owing to the snow that lay soddenly melting, grew into scenes and settings for the jewels of human companionships and boyish affections.