orty days in the desert and then returned to deliver the
world. If he had remained there all his life, and never met the
Pharisees and high-priests, our forefathers would have rejected his law.
For this reason there can be no more rest for the shy than for starving
Tantalus; for this reason my flight into the East had been foredoomed to
failure.

If shyness is thus affected by climate and geography, its birth and
growth are also conditioned by historical causes. Just as it is the
peculiar failing of northern and western peoples, so it is the creation
of comparatively modern times; it had no place among the classified
weaknesses of men until these peoples began in their turn to make
history.

In Greece, where limb and thought were consentient in one grace of
motion, the body was too perfect an expression of the mind to admit any
consciousness of discord; the greater simplicity of a life passed
largely in the open air, left no place for awkwardness in the franker
converse of man with man. Moreover the seclusion of women rendered
unnecessary that complicated code of manners which the freer intercourse
of the sexes has built up in later times as a barrier against brutality
or the unseemly selfishness of passion. In Greece the words of the witty
and the wise could be heard in the market-place; good conversation was
not for the few alone; and the common man might of unquestioned right
approach the circle of Socrates or Plato. The sense of community was
everywhere, overthrowing reserve, and propitious to the universal growth
of fellowship.

In the Roman world things were changed; there were more closed doors and
courts impenetrable of access. Insignia of office, gradations of wealth
and rank, sundered those of high estate from classes which now
acknowledged their own inferiority; privacies, exclusions, distinctions
innumerable, altered the face of public life as the easy _mos majorum_
was confined by the ordinances of encroaching fashion. It was now that
women began to be cast for leading parts upon the great stage of life.
Under the Empire, by the rapid removal of her disabilities the Roman
matron achieved a position of independence which made her, according to
her nature, a potent force of good or evil. It was now that the
intricate threads of social prescription were woven into that ceremonial
mantle which was afterwards to sit so uneasily on the shoulders of
barbarian men.

But the time for shyness was not yet come, f