They were the same behavior — the behavior of a person for whom other human beings exist only as a hierarchy of usefulness, to be trampled when beneath you and flattered when above.

The cruelty and the groveling came from the identical place; only the arrow of power had reversed.

That is what I tried to show her with my question, though I knew she would never understand it: that if her apology depended entirely on my bank balance, then it was not an apology at all but a bid, and that a bid reveals its author has learned nothing.

A person who has genuinely repented is sorry for what they did regardless of who they did it to; the wrongness lives in the act, not in the status of the victim.