That is when the truth walks out.

That is the only test that has ever meant anything.

People sometimes ask me — the few who know the whole story — whether I feel guilty about the deception of it, about the wig and the soil and the borrowed name.

I do not.

I have thought about it honestly and I do not, and the reason is simple: I did not create anything that afternoon.

I did not trick a kind woman into a moment of unkindness she would never otherwise have had.

I did not manufacture the cruelty; I only removed, for a few hours, the audience that had been suppressing it.

Everything the recorder caught was already there, fully formed, waiting for a room it believed was safe.

All I did was become that room.

A test is only unfair if it produces a result that would not otherwise be true — and there was nothing false about Sabine on that staircase.