One alone is perhaps the worse, but two alone are subject to the other element of social danger which I may mention next.
3.

Observers should report with especial care all cases of unusually close relationship between children in youth, such as childish favoritism, "platonic friendships," "chumming," in school or home, etc.

We have in these facts--and there is a very great variety of them--an exaggeration of the social or imitative tendency, a narrowing down of the personal sensibility to a peculiar line of well-formed influences.

It has never been studied by writers either on the genesis of social emotion or on the practice of education.

To be sure, teachers have been alive to the pros and cons of allowing children and students to room together; but that has been with view to the possibility of direct immoral or unwholesome contagion.