He thought, She's been hurt, badly. She needs reassuring, from a man who really cares about her. Barbara wondered again, What is the hidden sadness I sense he keeps locked inside him? Outwardly, he seems to be in total control of his emotions. But inwardly, he's tortured by something. What could it be? "Can we go to my office and talk about this?" Stephen asked. "Meanwhile, I'll call off the boxing class for today. Tim need not know how upset it's made you. I know you met me out here so as not to embarrass him in the gym."
Barbara agreed and they met a few minutes later in his office in the administration building. First, Stephen had gone to his locker in the gym and hastily put on a white polo shirt and cable-knit white tennis sweater. He thought she might feel better about him if he looked like a tennis coach instead of a boxing coach.
"The boys don't hurt each other, boxing," he tried to explain. "Their gloves are like two pillows."
"Even so, they're being taught to hurt each other."
"I agree that boxing can be a very dangerous sport, and a bad one. But not the way we teach it at Glenview."
"I saw Timmy!" she almost shouted. "He was beating the other boy and seemed to be enjoying it. That got to me, I want you to know! I will not have him learning to be a brute! Why are men so... so overly male sometimes?"
Again, Stephen thought he was beginning to understand her, although he did not totally agree with her.
"I believe we have a fundamental conflict in our ideas of how to raise boys... Timmy in particular," she said, more calmly than she thought possible.
"I'm trying to make a man of him."
It was not an answer she was comfortable with. "If boxing is your idea of making a man of him, I don't want you to go any further in that pursuit. I want him to become an all-around man, not just a hairy-chested ape or bully."
Stephen smothered an urge to laugh, or even smile. "I'm not hairy-chested but clean-chested. Nor am I an ape or bully, and I don't teach the boys to be 'overly masculine.'"
Barbara began to wonder if her latest encounter with Chet Armstrong had upset her so that she was taking out her frustrations against men and machismo on Stephen. But she could not tell him about Chet.