among girls than among boys, and for this there are several reasons:  (1) a boy more often has some acquaintance with sexual phenomena, and would frequently regard such a relationship as unmanly; (2) the girl has a stronger need of affection and self-devotion to another person than a boy has; (3) she has not, under our existing social conditions which compel young women to hold the opposite sex at arm’s length, the same opportunities of finding an outlet for her sexual emotions; while (4) conventional propriety recognizes a considerable degree of physical intimacy between girls, thus at once encouraging and cloaking the manifestations of homosexuality.

The ardent attachments which girls in schools and colleges form to each other and to their teachers constitute a subject which is of considerable psychological interest and of no little practical importance.[163] These girlish devotions, on the borderland between friendship and sexual passion, are found in all countries where girls are segregated for educational purposes, and their symptoms are, on the whole, singularly uniform, though they vary in intensity and character to some extent, from time to time and from place to place, sometimes assuming an epidemic form.  They have been most carefully studied in Italy, where Obici and Marchesini—­an alienist and a psychologist working in conjunction—­have analyzed the phenomena with remarkable insight and delicacy and much wealth of illustrative material.[164] But exactly the same phenomena are everywhere found in English girls’ schools, even of the most modern type, and in some of the large American women’s colleges they have sometimes become so acute as to cause much anxiety.[165] On the whole, however, it is probable that such manifestations are regarded more indulgently in girls’ than in boys’ schools, and in view of the fact that the manifestations of affection are normally more pronounced between girls than between boys, this seems reasonable.  The head mistress of an English training college writes:—­

“My own assumption on such, matters has been that affection does naturally belong to the body as well as the mind, and between two women is naturally and innocently expressed by, caresses.  I have never therefore felt that I ought to warn any girl against the physical element in friendship, as such.  The test I should probably suggest to them would be the same as one would use for any other relation—­was the friendship helping life as a whole, making them keener, kinder, more industrious, etc., or was it hindering it?”

Passionate friendships, of a more or less unconsciously sexual character, are common even outside and beyond school-life.  It frequently happens that a period during which a young woman falls in love at a distance with some young man of her acquaintance alternates with periods of intimate attachment to a friend of her own sex.  No congenital inversion is usually involved.  It generally happens, in the end, either