Was that proposition the equivalent of inviting European ladies to assemble scantily and scandalously clothed in the seclusion of a private park?
It seemed to be about that.
Without doubt modesty is nothing less than a holy feeling; and without doubt the person whose rule of modesty has been transgressed feels the same sort of wound that he would feel if something made holy to him by his religion had suffered a desecration.

I say "rule of modesty" because there are about a million rules in the world, and this makes a million standards to be looked out for.

Major Sleeman mentions the case of some high-caste veiled ladies who were profoundly scandalized when some English young ladies passed by with faces bare to the world; so scandalized that they spoke out with strong indignation and wondered that people could be so shameless as to expose their persons like that.

And yet "the legs of the objectors were naked to mid-thigh." Both parties were clean-minded and irreproachably modest, while abiding by their separate rules, but they couldn't have traded rules for a change without suffering considerable discomfort.

All human rules are more or less idiotic, I suppose.