And it is a mistake, Clara had come to understand over a lifetime of being underestimated, that reveals far more about the person making it than about the person being judged.

When Patrick looked at Clara and saw someone unworthy of his hotel, he believed he was reading her.

He was, in fact, only displaying himself.

Because the instinct to sort people by the cost of their clothing, to assign worth by the polish of a surface, is not a form of perception at all; it is a form of blindness, and a self-inflicted one.

It blinds a person to everything that actually matters about a stranger, the character, the history, the grief, the capacity, all the vast invisible interior that a faded jacket conceals and reveals nothing about, and it substitutes for genuine attention a lazy shortcut that is wrong far more often than the people who rely on it ever discover.