These changes give you clues as to what you might safely say, or if you
need to be quiet, if you can gaze directly at her, or if you'd best avert
your gaze and spend a moment silently performing a private inventory of
some kind. Before taking a breath, marshaling your energies, collecting
them for an exertion to take the atmosphere in a congruent or conflicting
direction.

Actually, it's not really a lithic face. It's a plain, hardy, utilitarian
face. It's like a rock formation of some kind, which strikes you not in
its hardness, which after all you couldn't feel anyway unless you reached
out and touched it, but impresses by its shape and countour. Unencumbered
by any semblance of saccharine sweetness, it's nonetheless impressive in
its sheer plainness, which puts you at ease immediately (and helpfully
ejects from your mind all the autonomic seduction reflexes which might
ordinarily get in the way.)

It's this face, one feels, that made her such a poor actress — but which
is no liability of any kind to her directing.