I want to dwell on how small it was, because the smallness is the point.

I did not storm out.

I did not make a speech.

I did not stiff anyone or play a trick or leave the restaurant unpaid.

I paid, in full, for myself, with a generous tip for the staff, which is the most ordinary and defensible thing a diner can do, and the fact that it felt, standing at that host stand, like an act of enormous daring tells you everything about how far I had let the arrangement bend me.

A grown woman with a good income had come to experience the simple settling of her own check as a transgression.