"No kindness is meaningless," she murmurs. It is the most important thing, she feels as the baker of Charlie's Coffeehouse in Old Town, New Arcadia, one can offer. And it means the most to offer kindness to those who have most forgotten it. What little she heard of Javert's world, it sounded like a place of institutionalized cruelty, through the law, or the church, or whatever authority the people had created and set above themselves. But cruelty is a human thing, just as kindness is. A world is no more cruel than it is kind.

"What purpose would you give him?"