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developed an emotional resilience often mistaken by strangers as sullenness or glacial indifference. Shutting down or detaching themselves emotionally from a painful situation became a routine survival tactic; they learned to stifle or crush their own raw feelings so as not to upset their mother and thus avoid another harrowing scene. By her behavior, Mrs. Nesbit also progressively alienated any friends who offered assistance. Nor would she relent to seek help from either her own or Winfield’s family, unless, as she said, there was absolutely no other alternative—which was almost always the case. But Mrs. Nesbit’s abrupt lapses from leaden silence into abysmal crying jags only hardened Florence Evelyn’s resolve not to become a weak and pitiful hysteric, even though they alarmed the girl with their ferocity and physically sickened Howard.
    Eventually, with no money whatsoever, the Nesbits moved in with Evelyn’s maternal grandmother. However, this arrangement didn’t last very long, and as she described it, “My earliest recollections of Pittsburgh are almost as painful as my later recollections.” The penny-pinching family of three then moved to Cedar Avenue in Allegheny. More often than not, they had only one meal a day, and it was meager. Depending on one’s point of view, Mrs. Nesbit either heroically, stupidly, or pathologically persisted in thinking she could somehow provide for herself and her children, despite all evidence to the contrary. She again borrowed some money from friends rather than family, and rented a house not far away in Shadyside on Fifth and South Highland Avenue with the intention of taking in boarders, figuring she could put her homespun skills to some practical use. It was a venture that would prove remarkably unsuccessful. And portentous.

    FIRST EXPOSURE
    According to Evelyn, it was a scorcher of a Sunday in August 1897, which for most people in Pittsburgh at that time meant sweating out the Sabbath heat from the front porch of their hard-won homes with either store-bought or improvised fans and lemonade. A barely perceptible, metallic-colored cloud of mill residue dissipated in the hot sun over the railroad tracks near Florence Evelyn’s so-called home, which felt as impermanent to her as it did to the boarders.
    Since it was Sunday, she was bored “almost to tears,” with no friends and nothing to do. Howard was nowhere to be found, having taken to wandering off alone in search of nothing in particular. As she sat on the top step of the boardinghouse stoop, envying the neighbors who had lemonade and store-bought fans, Florence Evelyn noticed a man strolling down Cedar Avenue with a camera in his hand. Always one to take the initiative, the girl called out to the man, a local photographer. He stopped and turned around to see who was asking in such a small, eager voice to have her picture taken.
    What he saw was twelve-and-a-half-year-old Florence Evelyn, whom he later said looked to him about eight or nine, running down the walk from the steps of the depressingly respectable boardinghouse. Everything about her seemed delightfully small except her thick hair and large piercing eyes. As he later recalled, she was “extremely pretty,” almost unnervingly so, with a “childish abundance of curls” held barely in check by a blue ribbon. Like all Florence Evelyn’s clothes, the dainty blue ankle-length dress with a matching waistband that she wore was one of her mother’s designs. The man, who had the professional’s eye for detail, remembered her worsted black stockings and thin-soled shoes resembling ballet slippers.
    He watched as she eyed the camera in his hands and smiled in a way that seemed alternately flirtatious and shy. She asked him again if he would take her picture, and put one hand behind her skirts in a demure pose. He complied, struck by the openness and enthusiasm of the girl, and promised to send a copy of the picture to the boardinghouse. For some reason,