cupied with desire.
Desires are forbidden, and desires lead to actions. It is evident
that every tender and proud woman--and these two things, being
cause and effect, naturally go together--must contract habits of
coldness which the people whom she disconcerts call prudery. The
power of modesty is so great that a tender woman betrays herself
with her lover rather by deeds than by words. The evil of
modesty is that it constantly leads to falsehood." (Stendhal, _De
l'Amour_, Chapter XXIV.)

It thus happens that, as Adler remarks (_Die Mangelhafte
Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes_, p. 133), the sexual impulse in
women is fettered by an inhibition which has to be conquered. A
thin veil of reticence, shyness, and anxiety is constantly cast
anew over a woman's love, and her wooer, in every act of
courtship, has the enjoyment of conquering afresh an oft-won
woman.

An interesting testimony to the part played by modesty in
effecting the union of the sexes is furnished by the fact--to
which attention has often been called--that the special modesty
of women usually tends to diminish, though not to disappear, with
the complete gratification of the sexual impulses. This may be
noted among savage as well as among civilized women. The
comparatively evanescent character of modesty has led to the
argument (Venturi, _Degenerazioni Psico-sessuali_, pp. 92-93)
that modesty (_pudore_) is possessed by women alone, men
exhibiting, instead, a sense of decency which remains at about
the same level of persistency throughout life. Viazzi ("Pudore
nell 'uomo e nella donna," _Rivista Mensile di Psichiatria
Forense_, 1898), on the contrary, following Sergi, argues that
men are, throughout, more modest than women; but the points he
brings forward, though often just, scarcely justify his
conclusion. While the young virgin, however, is more modest and
shy than the young man of the same age, the experienced married
woman is usually less so than her husband, and in a woman who is
a mother the shy reticences of virginal modesty would be rightly
felt to be ridiculous. ("Les petites pudeurs n'existent pas pour
les meres," remarks Goncourt, _Journal des Goncourt_, vol. iii,
p. 5.) She has put off a sexual livery that has no longer any
important part to play in life, and would, indeed, be
inconvenient