The law of obstacles has also created modesty and coyness, the twin sisters of chastity. To increase the obstacles to men’s advances, the woman imposed upon herself great restraint when in men’s company. All the exterior modesty which women require in expression, dress and behavior of their sex is to be explained by the desire to increase the obstacles. Feminine coyness prolongs the period of courtship. By keeping the suitor in suspense and doubt the imagination and the sentimental side of love are developed.[EA] Modesty and coyness, though appearing to be natural and inherited sentiments, are nothing more than natural obstacles that tend to increase the value of the favor granted. Woman, for this reason, watches not only over her own modesty, but is anxious also to protect the modesty of her sister. She watches with jealous eyes that feminine modesty should not be offended in any way. She is ever ready to succor her sister with all her means, in confinements, at accidents or in cases of sickness where the presence of men might offend feminine modesty.[EB] Honor and virtue in woman did not originally take their rise from any innate moral sense,—for a religious rite or a legal form even to-day mark for her the whole difference between irredeemable sin and absolute duty,—but from the mode of her position and in accordance with the conditions of her relation to men.[EC] Her morality is founded rather upon the rule of reason which is the best judge of duty. Woman’s modesty and coyness are nothing else but reason applied to human actions and regulating man’s appetites, desires and affections for the good of the family, community, nation and of the human race. Thus the fascinating details of the evolution of the marriage relations among men teach the lesson that the strong sentiment of chastity, this powerful moral law that controls human actions as the law of gravitation rules the world, has grown slowly from microscopic beginnings until it has assumed a racial consciousness which underlies that of the individual. Throughout the three periods of the history of mankind—savagery, barbarism, and civilization—the human heart felt a law within, written by the strong hand of the Creator, that man has to sacrifice personal comfort and freedom of action in the interest of posterity, and that it is preferable to suffer the pain of repressed passion and to bear its trial in the interest of that general morality which our conscience tells us to be of such fundamental value. CHAPTER XXIV MALE CHASTITY