Tacitus recites that chastity was a controlling virtue among the Teutons, ranking among women as bravery among men, yet all Teutons bathed in the streams together.  In Japan both sexes bathe in public in natural hot pools, and that without diffidence.  The Japanese, though a people of many clothes, regard nudity with indifference, but use garments to conceal the contour of the human form, while we are horrified by nakedness and yet use dress to enhance the form, especially to emphasize the difference between sexes.  Our women’s accentuated hips and waistlines shock the Japanese, whose loose clothing is the same for men and women, the broader belt and double fold upon the small of the back, the obi, being the only differentiation.

Mohammedan women surprised in bathing cover their faces first; the Chinese, the feet.  Good Erasmus, that Dutch theologian, said that “angels abhor nakedness.”  Devout Europeans of his day never saw their own bodies; if they bathed, they wore a garment covering them from head to feet.  Thus standards of clothing vary from age to age and from country to country.

Missionaries bewilder the savage mind by imposing their own standards of the moment and calling them modesty.  The African negro, struggling to harmonize these two ideas, wore a tall silk hat and a pair of slippers as his only garments when he obeyed Livingstone’s exhortations to clothe himself in the presence of white women.

Vait-hua was all savage; whatever bewilderments the missionaries had brought had faded when dwindling population left the isle to its own people.  In the minds of my happy companions at the vai puna, modesty had no more to do with clothing than, among us, it had to do with food.  The standards of the individual are everywhere formed by the mass-opinion of those about him; I came from my bath, replaced my garments, and felt myself Marquesan.

The sensation was false.  Savage peoples can never understand our philosophy, our complex springs of action.  They may ape our manners, wear our ornaments, and seek our company, but their souls remain indifferent.  They laugh when we are stolid.  They weep when we are unmoved.  Their gods and devils are not ours.

From our side, too, the abyss is impassable.  Civilization with its refinements and complexities has stripped us of the power of complete surrender to simple impulses.  The white who would become like a natural savage succeeds only in becoming a beast. “Plus sauvage que les kanakas,” is a proverb in the islands.  Its implications I had occasion to heed ere the evening was ended.

Wrapped only in a gorgeous red pareu, I sat on the paepae of the chief’s house, now become mine.  I was the especial care of Mrs. Seventh Man Who Wallows, who all afternoon long had sat on her haunches over a cocoanut husk fire stirring savory foods for me.  Fish, chickens, pigs, eggs, and native delicacies of all kinds she had cooked and sauced so appetizingly that I conferred on her the title of “Chefess” de Cuisine, and voiced my suspicions that some deserting cook from a flagship had traded his lore for her kisses.  Her laughter was spiced with pride, and the chief himself smilingly nodded and gestured to assure me that I had guessed right.