Those are entirely different things, and they look identical right up until the moment of the test.

For eighty-one years, no one had seriously threatened Eleanor Sterling, and so no one had ever seen what she became when threatened, and everyone — my father most of all — had filled in that blank with the assumption most convenient to them, which was that a gentle woman is a soft one.

She was not soft.

She had never been soft.

She had merely been at peace, which had never required her to show the steel underneath, and my father made the catastrophic error of confusing the sheath for the absence of a blade.