Julian had commanded the first kind of standing and gotten, in the end, the second.

When I told him I was standing, I did not mean that I had endured his cruelty.

I meant that I had outgrown it, that I had risen out from under it, that the woman he had tried to keep on her feet in a freezing train car as a punishment was now on her feet in a warm terminal as a victor, and that the difference between those two kinds of standing was the entire distance I had traveled in fifteen years and finally covered in one.

He had wanted me diminished, and instead he had, without meaning to, occasioned my rising.