that relationship with a man brings the normal impulse into permanent play, or the steadying of the emotions in the stress of practical life leads to a knowledge of the real nature of such feelings and a consequent distaste for them.  In some cases, on the other hand, such relationships, especially when formed after school-life, are fairly permanent.  An energetic emotional woman, not usually beautiful, will perhaps be devoted to another who may have found some rather specialized lifework, but who may be very unpractical, and who has probably a very feeble sexual instinct; she is grateful for her friends’s devotion, but may not actively reciprocate it.  The actual specific sexual phenomena generated in such cases vary very greatly.  The emotion may be latent or unconscious; it may be all on one side; it is often more or less recognized and shared.  Such cases are on the borderland of true sexual inversion, but they cannot be included within its region.  Sex in these relationships is scarcely the essential and fundamental element; it is more or less subordinate and parasitic.  There is often a semblance of a sex-relationship from the marked divergence of the friends in physical and psychic qualities, and the nervous development of one or both the friends is sometimes slightly abnormal.  We have to regard such relationships as hypertrophied friendships, the hypertrophy being due to unemployed sexual instinct.

The following narrative is written by a lady who holds a responsible educational position:  “A friend of mine, two or three years older than myself (I am 31), and living in the same house with me, has been passing through a very unhappy time.  Long nervous strain connected with this has made her sleep badly, and apt to wake in terrible depression about 3 o’clock in the morning.  In the early days of our friendship, about eight months ago, she occasionally at these times took refuge with me.  After a while I insisted on her consulting a doctor, who advised her, amongst other things, not to sleep alone.  Thenceforth for two or three months I induced her to share my room.  After a week or two she generally shared my bed for a time at the beginning of the night, as it seemed to help her to sleep.

“Before this, about the second or third time that she came to me in the early morning, I had been surprised and a little frightened to find how pleasant it was to me to have her, and how reluctant I was that she should go away.  When we began regularly to sleep in the same room, the physical part of our affection grew rapidly very strong.  It is natural for me generally to caress my friends, but I soon could not be alone in a room with this one without wanting to have my arms round her.  It would have been intolerable to me to live with her without being able to touch her.  We did not discuss it, but it was evident that the desire was even stronger in her than in me.

“For some time it satisfied us