In this connection it seems to me instructive to consider a special form of modesty very strongly marked among savages in some parts of the world.  I refer to the feeling of immodesty in eating.  Where this feeling exists, modesty is offended when one eats in public; the modest man retires to eat.  Indecency, said Cook, was utterly unknown among the Tahitians; but they would not eat together; even brothers and sisters had their separate baskets of provisions, and generally sat some yards apart, with their backs to each other, when they ate.[27] The Warrua of Central Africa, Cameron found, when offered a drink, put up a cloth before their faces while they swallowed it, and would not allow anyone to see them eat or drink; so that every man or woman must have his own fire and cook for himself.[28] Karl von den Steinen remarks, in his interesting book on Brazil, that though the Bakairi of Central Brazil have no feeling of shame about nakedness, they are ashamed to eat in public; they retire to eat, and hung their heads in shame-faced confusion when they saw him innocently eat in public.  Hrolf Vaughan Stevens found that, when he gave an Orang Laut (Malay) woman anything to eat, she not only would not eat it if her husband were present, but if any man were present she would go outside before eating or giving her children to eat.[29] Thus among these peoples the act of eating in public produces the same feelings as among ourselves the indecent exposure of the body in public.[30]

It is quite easy to understand how this arises.  Whenever there is any pressure on the means of subsistence, as among savages at some time or another there nearly always is, it must necessarily arouse a profound and mixed emotion of desire and disgust to see another person putting into his stomach what one might just as well have put into one’s own.[31] The special secrecy sometimes observed by women is probably due to the fact that women would be less able to resist the emotions that the act of eating would arouse in onlookers.  As social feeling develops, a man desires not only to eat in safety, but also to avoid being an object of disgust, and to spare his friends all unpleasant emotions.  Hence it becomes a requirement of ordinary decency to eat in private.  A man who eats in public becomes—­like the man who in our cities exposes his person in public—­an object of disgust and contempt.

Long ago, when a hospital student on midwifery duty in London slums, I had occasion to observe that among the women of the poor, and more especially in those who had lost the first bloom of youth, modesty consisted chiefly in the fear of being disgusting.  There was an almost pathetic anxiety, in the face of pain and discomfort, not to be disgusting in the doctor’s eyes.  This anxiety expressed itself in the ordinary symptoms of modesty.  But, as soon as the woman realized that I found nothing disgusting in whatever was proper and necessary to be done under the circumstances,