" Ana Magdalena nods. For an instant the blue eyes fix on his. 'She sees straight through me', he thinks with a jolt. 'Sees through me and doesn't like me'.
It hurts him. It is not something he is used to, being disliked, and being disliked moreover on no grounds. But perhaps it is not a personal dislike. Perhaps the woman dislikes the fathers of all her students, as rivals to her authority. Or perhaps she simply dislikes men, all save the invisible Arroyo.
Well, if she dislikes him he dislikes her too. It surprises him: he does not often take a dislike to a woman, particularly a beautiful woman. And this woman is beautiful, no doubt about that, with the kind of beauty that stands up to the closest scrutiny: perfect features, perfect skin, perfect figure, perfect bearing. She is beautiful yet she repels him. She may be married, but he associates her nevertheless with the moon and its cold light, with a cruel, persecutory chastity. Is it wise to be giving their boy - any boy, indeed any girl - into her hands? What if at the end of the year the child emerges from her grasp as cold and persecutory as herself? For that is his judgement on her - on her religion of the stars and her geometric aesthetic of the dance. Bloodless, sexless, lifeless. "

― J.M. Coetzee , The Schooldays of Jesus