our
capital's most splendid structure, but I could never bring myself to admit
it superior to or even equal to the Baths of Titus. To enter this
surpassing building, always congratulating myself on my right to enter the
baths and use them; to be one of the courtly throng of fashionable
notables resorting to them: I could never take these things as a matter of
course.

Nor could I ever take as a matter of course the sight of the bulk of
Rome's nobility, gentlemen and ladies together, thronging the great pools
and halls or roaming about the corridors, passage-ways or galleries, all
totally nude.

Social convention is an amazing factor in human life. One may say that
anything fashionable is accepted and that anything unfashionable is
banned. But that does not help one to explain to one's self the oddity of
some social conventions.

Oddest of all our Roman social conventions is the contrast between the
insistence on complete concealment of the human figure everywhere else and
the universal acceptance of its display at the Thermae.

At home, if receiving guests, on the streets, at a formal dinner, at
Palace levees, at the Circus games or in the Amphitheatre, a man must be
wrapped up in his toga. Any exposure of too much of the left arm, of
either ankle, is hooted at as bad form, is decried as indecent.

So of our ladies, on dinner sofas, on their reclining chairs in their
reception rooms, in their homes, in their litters abroad, at the
Amphitheatre or at the Circus games, from neck to instep they are muffled
up. If one catches a glimpse of a beauty's ankle as she goes up a stair,
one is thrilled, one watches eagerly, one cranes to look.

Yet one encounters the same beauty the same afternoon in a corridor of the
Baths of Titus, with nothing on but a net over her elaborate coiffure and
the bracelet with the key and number of the locker in which the attendant
has put away her clothing and valuables and one not only cannot stare at
her, one cannot look at her, not even if she accosts one and lingers for a
chat.

I have pondered over this, the most singular of our social conventions,
and the most mandatory and inescapable; and the more I ponder the more
singular it seems.

Yet it is real, it is a fact. One meets the wives of all one's friends,
the wives of all Rome's nobility, naked as they were born; they mingle
with the men in the swimming pools, in the ante-rooms, in the rest-rooms,
everywhere except in the shower-b