That is the reason why nakedness in itself has nothing to do with modesty or immodesty; it is the conditions under which the nakedness occurs which determine whether or not modesty will be roused.  If none of the factors of modesty are violated, if no embarrassing self-attention is excited, if there is a consciousness of perfect propriety alike in the subject and in the spectator, nakedness is entirely compatible with the most scrupulous modesty.  A. Duval, a pupil of Ingres, tells that a female model was once quietly posing, completely nude, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.  Suddenly she screamed and ran to cover herself with her garments.  She had seen a workman on the roof gazing inquisitively at her through a skylight.[66] And Paola Lombroso describes how a lady, a diplomatist’s wife, who went to a gathering where she found herself the only woman in evening dress, felt, to her own surprise, such sudden shame that she could not keep back her tears.

It thus comes about that the emotion of modesty necessarily depends on the feelings of the people around.  The absence of the emotion by no means signifies immodesty, provided that the reactions of modesty are at once set in motion under the stress of a spectator’s eye that is seen to be lustful, inquisitive, or reproachful.  This is proved to be the case among primitive peoples everywhere.  The Japanese woman, naked as in daily life she sometimes is, remains unconcerned because she excites no disagreeable attention, but the inquisitive and unmannerly European’s eye at once causes her to feel confusion.  Stratz, a physician, and one, moreover, who had long lived among the Javanese who frequently go naked, found that naked Japanese women felt no embarrassment in his presence.

It is doubtless as a cloak to the blush that we must explain the curious influence of darkness in restraining the manifestations of modesty, as many lovers have discovered, and as we may notice in our cities after dark.  This influence of darkness in inhibiting modesty is a very ancient observation.  Burton, in the Anatomy of Melancholy, quotes from Dandinus the saying “Nox facit impudentes,” directly associating this with blushing, and Bargagli, the Siennese novelist, wrote in the sixteenth century that, “it is commonly said of women, that they will do in the dark what they would not do in the light.”  It is true that the immodesty of a large city at night is to some extent explained by the irruption of prostitutes at that time; prostitutes, being habitually nearer to the threshold of immodesty, are more markedly affected by this influence.  But it is an influence to which the most modest women are, at all events in some degree, susceptible.  It has, indeed, been said that a woman is always more her real self in the dark than in the glare of daylight; this is part of what Chamberlain calls her night-inspiration.