“Don’t!” he said quickly. “You can’t do it that way! I—I know.”
His tone calmed her and she looked at him in a pathetic questioning manner, as though she, who had always been like a watchful mother to him, were now his child. He sincerely did not like to talk about himself; he would always have an almost fierce aloofness. But he would give Mrs. Latimer what he could—if there was anything to give.
“See!” he said. “Life is—life is a Medusa. Try to face it and it freezes you to stone. You must look at the—the mirrored reflection in yourself, in the shield of your own personality. Then you can see it, without horror, for the pitiful, snake-crowned, impotently ugly thing it is.” He paused, with an odd smile. “You even,” he added slowly, “can see a ravaged beauty in it.”
Mrs. Latimer stared at him in silence, but the tensity in her face had vanished, perhaps because she was surprised.
“And the sword—Perseus’ sword?” she asked finally.
“No,” he said, “that’s as far as the analogy goes. There is no sword.”
She gazed at him with a gentle eager look, and he saw that he really had helped her—not probably through anything he had said, but by awakening her capacity for sympathetic interest in others, her deep altruism. It was of him she was thinking now—proudly, as though he were herself. And, much as he disliked to, he would have gone on and told her everything he knew about himself if she had asked it. But she seemed to divine the effort he had made, and asked him nothing further.
“Oh!” she cried after a moment, with a tremulous laugh. “Your tea, Stacey!”
“I like it cold, thanks,” he said, also laughing.
And after this they managed to talk almost easily of common things.