As though, had they only known she was important, they would have behaved differently, which was precisely the point, precisely the failure.

The whole test, the only test that mattered, was how they treated a woman they believed to be no one.

And their defense was not that they had treated her well, but that they would have, if only they had known she was someone.

It was a confession disguised as an excuse.

I have thought a great deal about that particular defense, we didn’t know who she was, because it is the single most revealing sentence in the whole story, and because it is a sentence people offer, in one form or another, all the time, without hearing what it admits.

On its surface it sounds like a plea for understanding: we made an honest mistake, we would have behaved better with better information.