A presence that refreshed the water glasses and vanished.

Justin had looked at me that way his entire life, and had gone on looking at me that way in the library, when he weighed eighteen years of my life against four hundred dollars and found them equal.

But Mr.

Christopher had never once looked through me, and that, I understood now, walking through his silent halls, was the true measure of the man.

It is easy to be gracious to the people who can advance you, the powerful, the useful, the ones whose good opinion you need.

The real test of a person’s character — the only test that has ever meant anything to me — is how they treat the people they could safely ignore.