First, watch what a person does when no reward is attached

Let us begin with the number everyone has repeated incorrectly: seven. People say it takes seven days to know a person, as though character were a parcel delivered by the post on the eighth morning, properly sealed, with the sender’s name written in a legible hand. This is nonsense, and not merely because the week has been abused by calendars, saints’ lives, and optimistic employers. You do not know a person after seven days; you know what they cannot keep hidden for seven days.

The first week is not a small version of acquaintance, but a pressure test. People are still arranging their furniture, still choosing which stories to tell, still pretending that the inconvenience they cause is an exception rather than a habit. Yet the habits escape. They escape in the way a man speaks to a servant when the conversation is not important, in the five minutes he is late and the explanation he has prepared for it, in whether she returns a borrowed book with the page corner turned down. Not in the grand confession. In the margin.

I have kept account of these margins for longer than is socially advisable. On the third day, a new acquaintance once told me that his father had died “in the winter of ’98,” and corrected himself to “’99” only after I pointed out that the old bridge had not yet been built in 1998. He was not a liar, exactly; he was a man who preferred the shape of a story to the inconvenience of its dates. This is more revealing than lying. A liar fears discovery. The careless storyteller merely assumes that facts will forgive him.

The first week gives us, in numbered order, at least three reliable indications.

First, watch what a person does when no reward is attached. Does he put the chair back? Does she answer the message that requires effort and offers no advantage? Does either of them thank the person whose work has made their comfort possible? Courtesy under observation is theatre, and theatre has its uses, but the unattended room is where the accounts are kept.

Second, watch how they describe people who are absent. A person who speaks tenderly of everyone is often only collecting future witnesses; a person who condemns everyone is usually describing the same wound from different angles. The useful distinction is whether they can name another person’s error without stripping that person of all dignity. This is where the first week becomes expensive, because sympathy is not the same as agreement, and many people would rather be thought kind than be accurate.

Third, watch what happens when the small plan fails. Not the harvest ruined by hail, not the ship lost beyond the cape—those disasters permit a man to become the hero of his own account—but the wrong table at supper, the missing key, the delayed carriage, the cup knocked over beside the ledger. Does he seek the next fact, or the nearest culprit? The ruler’s first mistake is usually arithmetic, and the ordinary person’s first mistake is often the same: he counts the insult before he counts the causes.

It is rather like an explorer who reached the wrong shore— (the important matter is not that he insists it was the shore he intended, but whether he begins measuring the coast once he knows the map is wrong). In the first week, people reveal whether they want the truth or merely a version of events in which they remain innocent. That preference governs nearly everything that follows: friendship, marriage, business, the distribution of blame after a granary collapses beneath its own snow.

There are cautions, naturally. First impressions can be falsified; so can second impressions, and the third, if the person has enough leisure. Grief makes the punctual late, illness makes the generous sharp-tongued, and fear gives even decent people the manners of locked doors. We must not mistake a bad week for a bad character. I am arguing only that the first week contains evidence, and that evidence is frequently dismissed because it is inconveniently small.

People say they want to know who someone “really is,” but what they usually want is a declaration, a clean sentence, a verdict suitable for copying into the front of a book. Character is less accommodating. It appears as ink appears when the water is wrong: unevenly, with sediment, in strokes that tell us more about the maker’s hand than the message intended. The first week matters because it catches the hand before the writer remembers to disguise it.

And yet, before anyone accuses me of excessive confidence, I will add this: some of the finest people I have known began badly, and some of the worst began with perfect manners. The ledger is evidence, not judgment. Still, if you ignore the first week, you are not being generous; you are merely postponing the arithmetic.