A fellow-student on
similar duty, who also discovered for himself the same character of
modesty--that if he was careful to guard her modesty the woman was careful
also, and that if he was not the woman was not--remarked on it to me with
sadness; it seemed to him derogatory to womanhood that what he had been
accustomed to consider its supreme grace should be so superficial that he
could at will set limits to it.[33] I thought then, as I think still, that
that was rather a perversion of the matter, and that nothing becomes
degrading because we happen to have learned something about its
operations. But I am more convinced than ever that the fear of causing
disgust--a fear quite distinct from that of losing a sexual lure or
breaking a rule of social etiquette--plays a very large part in the
modesty of the more modest sex, and in modesty generally. Our Venuses, as
Lucretius long since remarked and Montaigne after him, are careful to
conceal from their lovers the _vita postscenia_, and that fantastic fate
which placed so near together the supreme foci of physical attraction and
physical repugnance, has immensely contributed to build up all the
subtlest coquetries of courtship. Whatever stimulates self-confidence and
lulls the fear of evoking disgust--whether it is the presence of a beloved
person in whose good opinion complete confidence is felt, or whether it is
merely the grosser narcotizing influence of a slight degree of
intoxication--always automatically lulls the emotion of modesty.
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