s the
most pudent girl," remarked Restif de la Bretonne whose experience of
women was so extensive, "the girl who blushes most, who is most disposed
to the pleasures of love," he adds that, in girls and boys alike, shyness
is a premature consciousness of sex.[22] This observation has even become
embodied in popular proverbs. "Do as the lasses do--say no, but take it,"
is a Scotch saying, to which corresponds the Welsh saying, "The more
prudish the more unchaste."[23]

It is not, at first, quite clear why an excessively shy and
modest woman should be the most apt for intimate relationships
with a man, and in such a case the woman is often charged with
hypocrisy. There is, however, no hypocrisy in the matter. The shy
and reserved woman holds herself aloof from intimacy in ordinary
friendship, because she is acutely sensitive to the judgments of
others, and fears that any seemingly immodest action may make an
unfavorable opinion. With a lover, however, in whose eyes she
feels assured that her actions can not be viewed unfavorably,
these barriers of modesty fall down, and the resulting intimacy
becomes all the more fascinating to the woman because of its
contrast with the extreme reserve she is impelled to maintain in
other relationships. It thus happens that many modest women who,
in non-sexual relationships with their own sex, are not able to
act with the physical unreserve not uncommon with women among
themselves, yet feel no such reserve with a man, when they are
once confident of his good opinion. Much the same is true of
modest and sensitive men in their relations with women.

This fundamental animal factor of modesty, rooted in the natural facts of
the sexual life of the higher mammals, and especially man, obviously will
not explain all the phenomena of modesty. We must turn to the other great
primary element of modesty, the social factor.

We cannot doubt that one of the most primitive and universal of the social
characteristics of man is an aptitude for disgust, founded, as it is, on a
yet more primitive and animal aptitude for disgust, which has little or no
social significance. In nearly all races, even the most savage, we seem
to find distinct traces of this aptitude for disgust in the presence of
certain actions of others, an emotion naturally reflected in the
individual's own actions, and hence a guide to conduct. Notwithstanding
our ga