Not everything that is taken is taken obviously.
There is the guest who leaves with something in their bag that arrived in someone else's home. A small thing, usually. An object that was admired during the evening and then found, later, to be absent. A book from the shelf. Something from the bathroom. The lighter that was on the table. These things do not vanish in any dramatic way. They are simply no longer there, and the host, doing the quiet inventory that follows any gathering, notices the absence and works out what it means.
This is theft. It is a small and specific kind of theft, the kind that is almost never confronted because the confrontation would require a certainty that the host usually cannot prove and a conversation that the social contract around hospitality makes nearly impossible to have. The thief knows this. In most cases the thief has always known this. The small-scale theft from a host's home is in many ways the perfect crime: low value, low risk, and insulated by the very warmth of the occasion from which it was taken.
But the taking is not always of objects. The guest who steals from a host can do it in other ways. The conversation that was meant for someone else and was taken over. The credit for the evening that was absorbed rather than directed back to the person who produced it. The story told that belonged to another person at the table and was retold as though it were the teller's own.
The strawberry stall operates on trust. You take a strawberry to taste, and you buy if you like them. You do not fill a bag while the vendor looks away. The vendor is not foolish. The vendor is extending a courtesy that costs them something, and the person who abuses it has not simply taken a strawberry. They have taken the vendor's good faith, and they have not replaced it with anything.
A guest in someone's home is in the same position. The host has extended a courtesy. The home is open. The contents are visible. The trust is present. The guest who takes anything from that arrangement that was not freely given has taken something that cannot be returned, even if the object itself could be.
The thief takes something without permission. The guest in the next chapter does the same thing, but with a smile and a perfectly prepared explanation for why it was not really taking at all.