She was smart, of course, and she did not have a mean bone in her body. She had, as Jane Austen observed of Anne Elliot, “elegance of mind and sweetness of character.” While some assholes would view a professor grilling a student the way a Roman viewed a lion approaching a Christian, hoping for the latter’s painful demise, you could sense Suze cringing and quietly giving a sigh of relief when the student survived or a frown when she did not. Doing, thinking, anything else simply would not occur to her.
I sometimes embarrassed myself when I was not as sympathetic or empathetic as she expected me to be. I soon realized that she was uncomfortable when I sprinkled obscenities in my sentences, and I tried to cut down on it because it made her uncomfortable, as it did my Mom. I took all of this as a sign that she had great expectations for me and I got angry with myself when I felt I disappointed her. And next to my Mom she was suddenly the last person I could ever want to disappoint.