Something cold trickled between her toes. She looked down at the scuffed and apparently leaking boy's boots that she wore, inherited from one of the twins probably. She had found them on one of her raids through the empty rooms in Worthington House, the ones on the upper story, the ones Miranda had not quite put in order yet.

The dusty chambers were filled with trunks and strange oddities, like theater props and outrageous masks and strange and lumpy things that looked as though they were meant to look like rocks or tree trunks but were actually seats. There were spangled lengths of cloth and exotic embroidered sashes and funny shoes that curled up with the toes and even bizarre wigs that had gone a bit discolored and didn't smell at all nice.

Among the flotsam and jetsam of her parents' former lives there were also trunks of old clothing, mostly that of growing boys saved for the next growing boy to wear. There were no more boys to come. Only Attie, who found trousers comfortable and vastly more durable than something silky and restricting that she had to be careful of and couldn't sit on the floor in, or climb in, or make her flinch away slightly in alarm when she caught a glance of herself reflected in a window or looking glass.

Attie had no interest in growing up and even less interest in becoming a "young lady" as Miranda put it.

Ever.

"I realize that my humble shop cannot offer the same comforts as this fine alleyway, but if you should feel so inclined, I believe Cabot has just made a nice hot pot of tea."

At the familiar, kindly voice, Attie didn't look up from her station leaning against the brick wall of the building opposite and standing with her arms folded across her thankfully still-flat chest as she watched the rain dripping from her hat brim. "What kind of tea?"

It was a marvelous brew of Chinese tea, actually, accompanied by a truly sumptuous plate of iced tea cakes, each crowned with a single perfect candied hazelnut. Elektra would have said it was too pretty to eat. Attie thought that was foolishness. After all, if she didn't eat it, it would eventually become a pile of rotted cake. And therefore no longer pretty, whether she ate it or not.

As she drank the hot tea and munched a sizable dent into the bounty heaped on the plate, she felt her spirits rise in the cozy, familiar environment of Button's workroom.

When Attie had been small she was wont to spend her time playing beneath her mother's easel. This habit had nearly driven her elder sister Callie mad with frustration, for it had been Callie who felt the need to comb and sometimes cut the spatters of oil paint from Attie's hair.