The Way You Treat a Stranger

And Clara looked at him, and gave him the only answer his own words had earned.

“Then I suggest,” she said, “you learn how to treat other people’s families with respect.

Because tomorrow morning, you will be looking for work elsewhere.” It was not cruelty, whatever Karl’s stricken face suggested, and Clara felt no pleasure in it.

It was consequence, clean and proportionate.

These were not men who had made a single honest mistake on a hard night; they were men who had revealed, in the way they treated a stranger they believed to be powerless, and in the way they habitually treated a housekeeper they considered furniture, a settled contempt for anyone they deemed beneath them.

And that contempt was, quite simply, incompatible with the work of hospitality, which is the work of treating every human being who walks through the door with dignity, especially the ones who seem to have nothing to offer.