[63] It is frequently stated that prostitutes are devoid of modesty, but this is incorrect; they possess a partial and diminished modesty which, for a considerable period still remains genuine (see e.g., Reuss, La Prostitution, p. 58).  Lombroso and Ferrero (La Donna, p. 540) refer to the objection of prostitutes to be examined during the monthly periods as often greater than that of respectable women.  Again, Callari states ("Prostituzione in Sicilia,” Archivio di Psichiatria, 1903, p. 205), that Sicilian prostitutes can only with difficulty be persuaded to expose themselves naked in the practice of their profession.  Aretino long since remarked (in La Pippa) that no women so detest gratuitous decolletage as prostitutes.  When prostitutes do not possess modesty, they frequently simulate it, and Ferriani remarks (in his Delinquenti Minorenni) that of ninety-seven minors (mostly females) accused of offences against public decency, seventy-five simulated a modesty which, in his opinion, they were entirely without.

III.

The Blush the Sanction of Modesty—­The Phenomena of Blushing—­Influences Which Modify the Aptitude to Blush—­Darkness, Concealment of the Face, Etc.

It is impossible to contemplate this series of phenomena, so radically persistent whatever its changes of form, and so constant throughout every stage of civilization, without feeling that, although modesty cannot properly be called an instinct, there must be some physiological basis to support it.  Undoubtedly such a basis is formed by that vasomotor mechanism of which the most obvious outward sign is, in human beings, the blush.  All the allied emotional forms of fear—­shame, bashfulness, timidity—­are to some extent upheld by this mechanism, but such is especially the case with the emotion we are now concerned with.[64] The blush is the sanction of modesty.

The blush is, indeed, only a part, almost, perhaps, an accidental part, of the organic turmoil with which it is associated.  Partridge, who has studied the phenomena of blushing in one hundred and twenty cases (Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1897), finds that the following are the general symptoms:  tremors near the waist, weakness in the limbs, pressure, trembling, warmth, weight or beating in the chest, warm wave from feet upward, quivering of heart, stoppage and then rapid beating of heart, coldness all over followed by heat, dizziness, tingling of toes and fingers, numbness, something rising in throat, smarting of eyes, singing in ears, prickling sensations of face, and pressure inside head.  Partridge considers that the disturbance is primarily central, a change in the cerebral circulation, and that the actual redness of the surface comes late in the nerve storm, and is really but a small part of it.

There has been some discussion as to