"The teaching was certainly bad. Moreover, I had not any friends, and this made me very sensitive. It was to a great extent my fault. When I first went there I was taken up by a set above me—boys who were 'senior' to me in standing. When they left I found myself alone.
"My unpopularity was increased by my being considered to put on 'side'; also because I paid attention to my dress.
"At the public school I had homosexual relations with various boys, usually without any passion. With one boy, however, I was deeply in love for over a year; I thought of him, dreamed of him, would have been content only to kiss him. But my courtship met with no success.
"When carrying on with other boys the desire to reach the crisis was not always strong, perhaps out of shyness or modesty. Occasionally I had intercrural connection, which gave me the first intimation of what intercourse with a woman was like. When I masturbated in solitude I used to continue till the orgasm.
"My housemaster one day sent for me and said he had walked through my cubicle and noticed a stain on the sheet. At this time I used to have nocturnal emissions. I cannot remember whether on this occasion the stain was due to one, or to masturbation. But I imagined that one did not have 'wet dreams' unless one masturbated. So when he went on to say that this was a proof that I was immoral I acknowledged I masturbated. He then told me I would injure my health—possibly 'weaken my heart,' or 'send myself mad'; he said that he would ask me to promise never to do it again.
"I promised. I left humiliated and ashamed of myself; also generally frightened. He used to send for me every now and then, and ask me if I had kept my promise. For some months I did. Then I relapsed, and told him when he asked me. Ultimately he ceased sending for me—apparently convinced either that I was cured or that I was incorrigible.
"A year or so afterward he discovered in my study (for I was now in the upper school and had a study) a French photograph that a boy had given me, entitled 'Qui est dans ma chambre?' It represented a man going by mistake into the wrong bedroom; inside the room was a woman, in nightdress, in an attitude that suggested she had just been relieving herself. My housemaster told me the picture was terribly indecent, and that, taken with what he knew of my habits, it showed I was not a safe boy to be in the school. He added that he did not wish to make trouble at home, but that he advised me to get my parents to remove me at the end of that term, instead of the following term, when, in the ordinary course of things, I should have left.
"I wrote to my people to say I was miserable at school, and I was removed at the end of that term.
"My first case of true heterosexual passion was with a girl called D., whom I first knew when she was about 16. My family and hers were friendly. My attraction to her soon became a matter of common knowledge and joking to members of my family. She was a dark, passionate-looking child, with large eyes that—to me—seemed full of an inner knowledge of sexual mysteries. Precocious, vain, jealous, untruthful—those were qualities in her that I myself soon recognized. But the very fact that she was not conventionally 'goody-goody' proved an attraction to me.
"I never openly made love to her, but I delighted to be near her. Our ages were sufficiently separated for this to be noticeable. I dreamed of her, and my highest ideal of blessedness was to kiss her and tell her I loved her. I heard that she had been discovered talking indecently in a w.c. to some little boys, sons of a friend of my family's. The knowledge of this precocity on her part intensified my fascination for her.