It happened so often over the years that I stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing a kindness that has become routine.

But I have thought about it a great deal since, because I understand now what it actually was.

A man who asks after a servant’s grandchild every Monday for eighteen years, by name, and remembers his spelling tests, and sends him apples — that is not merely an employer being polite.

That is a man who has decided that the people in his house matter to him, all of them, down to a little boy he would never lay eyes on.

Justin, his own son, would not have been able to tell you my grandson’s name.

Mr.