And the answer is the most frightening thing I learned that night, which is that cruelty, when it is sanctioned by the powerful person in the room, does not feel like cruelty to the people participating in it.

It feels like fun.

It feels like being on the right side, the winning side, the side of the charming host.

Not one of those four hundred people, I am certain, thought of themselves in that moment as cruel.

They thought they were laughing along with a funny man at his funny expense of an awkward daughter, and the fact that the awkward daughter was a person, sitting in cold water, being publicly degraded by her own father, did not register, because Arthur had spent decades training everyone around him not to let it register.

That is how it works.