I did not defeat Vance with a brilliant scheme.

The document was not a trick; every word of it was true and plain and legally sound, and his own attorney could have read it to him in five minutes and warned him off.

I defeated Vance with his contempt for me, which did the reading-carefully for him, and decided in advance that anything I put in front of him was beneath his attention.

He skimmed two pages and signed because he had already concluded, years before, that I was not a person who needed to be read closely — that whatever the responsible, boring, reliable wife was handing him was surely just more of her being responsible and boring and reliable, another dull instrument of her endless usefulness.

His certainty about who I was made him incapable of seeing what I was actually doing, even as he did it with his own hand.

And that, I have come to understand, is the deepest thing underestimation does: it does not only insult you, it blinds the person doing it.