But among older girls they are a very different thing and often lead to serious trouble and unhappiness. What has happened in such cases is that an instinct which is designed to produce love for one of the opposite sex has been perverted to add an element of passion to what should have been merely a healthy friendship for another woman. And the result is an unhealthy type of relationship. It is unhealthy because, to begin with, in this way girls let themselves go and allow their emotions to run away with them; and that just at a time when it is most important that they should have themselves in firm control. And further, when members of the same sex employ lovers' language, and indulge in the imitation of lovers' endearments, there is something sickly about the whole business which healthy instinct condemns. I do not mean, of course, that when girls link arms or even embrace each other in moments of excitement there is anything mistaken. To some people such expressions of emotion are as natural as breathing. But _grandes passions_ lead to much more than that sort of thing, and so become a serious evil. It is in connection with this problem that psychologists have brought into use the rather ugly word "homosexuality", though it means nothing more dreadful than this tendency to put a member of one's own sex into the place that should be occupied by a member of the other sex. But I find a certain amount of talk going on which assumes that some people are of the homosexual type, and that it is natural and right for them to express themselves in this way. As a matter of fact homosexuality _is always a sexual perversion_ and is fraught with great danger of nervous disorder. Dr. Crichton Miller says in _The New Psychology and the Teacher_: "From the point of view of psychological development homosexuality in the adult is a regression.... Clinical experience confirms the view that in the long run the man or the woman of the intermediate type is bound to pay the price of regression in one way or another" (p. 120).