But abruptly, when she apparently considered she had cried enough, the young woman stopped, blew her nose, and wiped her eyes. Quite containedly. He could almost see the features settles into a kind of haughty rigidity that belied the past half-hour. Her face became one that refused to mark itself with suffering. He knew, even before he saw them, that her eyes would be without vital expression, and that her lips and cheeks and old once-used laugh wrinkles would have to do all her smiling from then on. He did not even feel she would regret it. Somehow this settling into impenetrability, into a sanctuary from further pain, seemed more pathetic to him than her tears. At the same time her icy fortitude in the face of love's desertion struck him as particularly white American. No blues would ever come from such a saving of face. It showed a lack of self-pity (and Grange believed firmly that one's self was often in need of a little sympathetic pity) that also meant less sympathy for the basic tragedies that occurred in the human situation. She appeared to him to be the kind of woman who could raise ten sons to be killed in war, sending them off with a minimum of tears one at a time, collecting a stack of flags to prove her own bravery.
alice walker, the third life of grange copeland