63] 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 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 ene