[29] Stevens, “Mittheilungen aus dem Frauenleben der Orang Belendas,” Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, Heft 4, p. 167, 1896.  Crawley, (Mystic Rose, Ch.  VIII, p. 439) gives numerous other instances, even in Europe, with, however, special reference to sexual taboo.  I may remark that English people of lower class, especially women, are often modest about eating in the presence of people of higher class.  This feeling is, no doubt, due, in part, to the consciousness of defective etiquette, but that very consciousness is, in part, a development of the fear of causing disgust, which is a component of modesty.

[30] Shame in regard to eating, it may be added, occasionally appears as a neurasthenic obsession in civilization, and has been studied as a form of psychasthenia by Janet.  See e.g., (Raymond and Janet, Les Obsessions et la Psychasthenie, vol. ii, p. 386) the case of a young girl of 24, who, from the age of 12 or 13 (the epoch of puberty) had been ashamed to eat in public, thinking it nasty and ugly to do so, and arguing that it ought only to be done in private, like urination.

[31] “Desire and disgust are curiously blended,” remarks Crawley (The Mystic Rose, p. 139), “when, with one’s own desire unsatisfied, one sees the satisfaction of another; and here we may see the altruistic stage beginning; this has two sides, the fear of causing desire in others, and the fear of causing disgust; in each case, personal isolation is the psychological result.”

[32] Hohenemser argues that the fear of causing disgust cannot be a part of shame.  But he also argues that shame is simply psychic stasis, and it is quite easy to see, as in the above case, that the fear of causing disgust is simply a manifestation of psychic stasis.  There is a conflict in the woman’s mind between the idea of herself which she has already given, and the more degraded idea of herself which she fears she is likely to give, and this conflict is settled when she is made to feel that the first idea may still be maintained under the new circumstances.

[33] We neither of us knew that we had merely made afresh a very ancient discovery.  Casanova, more than a century ago, quoted the remark of a friend of his, that the easiest way to overcome the modesty of a woman is to suppose it non-existent; and he adds a saying, which he attributes to Clement of Alexandria, that modesty, which seems so deeply rooted in women, only resides in the linen that covers them, and vanishes when it vanishes.  The passage to which Casanova referred occurs in the Paedagogus, and has already been quoted.  The observation seems to have appealed strongly to the Fathers, always glad to make a point against women, and I have met with it in Cyprian’s De Habitu Feminarum.  It also occurs in Jerome’s treatise against Jovinian.  Jerome, with more scholarly instinct, rightly presents the remark as a quotation:  “Scribit Herodotus quod mulier cum veste deponat et verecundiam.”  In Herodotus the saying is attributed to Gyges (Book I, Chapter VIII).  We may thus trace very far back into antiquity an observation which in English has received its classical expression from Chaucer, who, in his “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” has:—­