Look at me

...maybe the instinct to avoid the truth was a healthy one, for if one were to give way to such a display of naked need how could one ever recover any semblance of adulthood? To have the world see one in such state of disorder seemed to me at that moment so terrible that I began once again to revise my estimate of human behaviour and to see new virtues in civilised dissimulation. One must, at all events, keep up appearances.

From the book, Look At Me
by Anita Brookner