Most people, without ever deciding to, treat the important and the powerful and the useful as though they are more real than the ordinary and the humble and the overlooked — pay closer attention to them, remember their names, laugh at their jokes, ask after their children.

It is not usually cruelty.

It is a kind of sleepwalking, a default setting of the human heart that sorts everyone we meet, automatically, by what they can do for us.

Mr.

Christopher had woken up out of that sleep somewhere along the way, perhaps when he lost his wife, perhaps only when he grew old enough to see how little his money had actually bought him in the way of real company.

And once he was awake, he could not un-see what he saw, which was that the woman refilling his water glass was every bit as real, and as full of grief and love and a whole invisible life, as the important men who came to his study to talk about money.