The maintenance of decorum as a principle and a rule is compatible with astonishing oversights and omissions which strike a foreigner so forcibly that he thinks there no decorum at all. In these cases, the foreigner’s mistake is usually to be unaware of some powerful conventionalism by which decorum is theoretically maintained whilst it is practically violated. Travellers in Japan are astonished by the old Japanese system of bathing. One asks for a bath in a Japanese inn, and it is prepared, perhaps, in the common room or the kitchen, in the midst of the usual movement of men and women. Here, if anywhere, is surely a gross violation of decorum. No; it appears that by a convenient fiction a bather is not seen, and the same fiction allows the Japanese themselves to bathe together without any separation of sexes. When I was a boy there existed a certain conventionalism of the same kind in England. In those days bathing-dresses were only used by women, men always bathed in a state of complete nudity, and they were frequently close to the sea-shore whilst ladies were walking about and looking on. A French author gave, at that time or a little later, an account of his embarrassment when bathing in a lonely place on the shores of England. He had left his clothes on the beach, when some ladies came and pitched their camp-stools on the spot. He splashed to attract their attention, but they sat on, impassible. At length he quitted the water and made a bold advance, but with no effect. Finally he marched past, like a regiment at a review, and the ladies kept their places. Nothing, in this little adventure, violates the English decorum of former days. The Frenchman could not have presented himself, like Adam, in a garden, but on the sea-beach _il n’y avait rien à dire_. The ladies bravely acted on the fiction that a _sea_-bather is invisible, and they consistently carried out that fiction to the end. The Frenchman knew not that he had the ring of Gyges, the talisman of invisibility. [Sidenote: French Bathing.] The French have a conventionalism about bathing-dresses which does not exist in England to the same degree. French decorum permits men and women to bathe together freely on condition that they have a costume. At the sea-side a “full costume” is required, but that is not much, and the feminine form of it is very pretty--rather too pretty, in fact, as it is too obviously intended to attract eyes rather than turn them away. Besides being pretty, the feminine bathing-dresses are extremely varied, leaving free play to the inventive fancy. A puritan legislator would feel tempted to replace those charming costumes by the plain old English bathing-gown, which was doubly useful, as it concealed both ugliness and beauty with equal impartiality. [Sidenote: The Frenchman in his _Caleçon_.]