covering very easily
when nudity is commonplace. Vait-hua was to teach me to be modest
without pother, to chat with those about me during my ablutions
without concern for the false vanities of screens or even the
shelter of rocks as in the river in Atuona. In such scenes one
perceives that immodesty is in the false shame that makes one cling
to clothes, rather than in the simple virtues that walk naked and
unashamed.

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 s