Upright the Two of Swords is read as indecision, a stalemate, or a difficult choice held in uneasy balance; reversed, as confusion, information overload, or avoidance finally becoming unsustainable.
Pre-Golden-Dawn cartomancy read a bare two of swords as an early disturbance in the air suit, discord just beginning rather than Smith's specific picture of a choice being actively refused; the blindfold and the crossed arms are her own invention, and it is this detail, not the older number-based tradition or the Golden Dawn's Peace Restored title, that gives the card its now-dominant reading as willful avoidance rather than simple early conflict.
Waite's own printed meaning, conformity and the equipoise it suggests, together with tension held, is somewhat more neutral than the frustration with avoidance many contemporary readers now bring to the card; the reading of the blindfold as self-imposed rather than simply protective is a later interpretive layer, one that treats the figure as choosing not to see rather than as unable to.
The Golden Dawn and Thoth titles, Peace Restored and Peace, sit oddly against the indecision reading most practitioners now favor, since neither title implies a choice still pending; some readers reconcile this by treating the card's peace as itself the problem, a truce maintained specifically by refusing to resolve the underlying conflict, which the blindfold makes literal.