And so they had looked at Robert Whitmore, one of the most powerful men in American business, and seen a nobody, because his surface did not announce him.

Their snobbery was not merely cruel; it was a genuine perceptual handicap, a self-inflicted blindness far more disabling than Grace’s, because Grace knew she could not see and compensated with attention, while the Caldwells believed their sight was perfect and therefore trusted it completely, right off a cliff.

They had a blind woman at their table who perceived the truth of every person present, and three sighted people who could not perceive the truth of anyone, because they had trained themselves to look only at the costume and never at the actor wearing it.

Victoria had asked Robert how much money he made because, to her, the number was the man — there was nothing else to a person worth knowing.