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although he noted the address, he had neglected to ask her name. Nonetheless, the man was so affected by the charming girl that he had the photo printed in a local Pittsburgh paper. He framed the original photograph and kept it on a shelf in his studio, little realizing that he was the first in a long line of professional photographers who saw something unique in this uncommon and willing little natural model.
    But no matter how much they scrimped, the family seemed always on the verge of utter insolvency. In a telling indication of things to come, her mother, out of willful ignorance, wanton desperation, or monstrous calculation, exploited the pathetic state of affairs by sending her appealing prepubescent daughter to collect the weekly rents from the boarders, figuring that Florence Evelyn’s looks would soften those who might not otherwise pay their rents on time. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of boarders were middle-aged men; many were drummers (salesmen) or some equally transient type, while a number of them had no identifiable profession or particular social graces. Much later in life, Evelyn related to her daughter-in-law that even at such a young age, she sensed it was inappropriate for a child to knock on strange men’s doors to ask for rent money: “Mamma was always worried about the rent,” Evelyn recalled in 1915, but it was “too hard a thing” for her to actually ask for it every week, “and it never went smoothly.” Although Florence Evelyn obeyed her mamma, the leering faces and sometimes glassy-eyed stares of the boarders, who smelled of whiskey or worse, made the twelve-year-old extremely uncomfortable. So did the comments a few felt compelled to mutter under their breath while squeezing their grimy two dollars’ weekly rent into her small, soft hands.
    But even Florence Evelyn’s nascent charms could not keep the boardinghouse running at a profit, and little more than a month or so after the incident with the photographer, she and her mother had to relocate to a smaller boardinghouse solely as tenants. Out of necessity, Howard was conveniently sent once more to stay with an aunt outside Pittsburgh. One can only speculate on the jumble of feelings churning within Mrs. Nesbit, whose fears and ineffectuality forced her to hide from her relatives and to place Howard, so she said, out of harm’s way (out of sight, out of mind) while she and her alternately hardheaded and dreamy daughter lived in the claustrophobic quarters of a room that Evelyn recalled in a letter “even mice rejected.” One also wonders what nine-year-old Howard, who was far more sensitive and overtly needy than his sister, must have felt, living most of the time as if he were already an orphan. And an only child.
    A deepening, double-edged fear of rejection and abandonment was imprinted indelibly on Florence Evelyn’s young psyche, exacerbated by the constant upheaval and shuffling from one tedious boardinghouse to the next. Deprived of any sustained contact with other children (except her brother and occasionally her “country cousins”), friendships for the restless, lonely girl with anyone her own age were fleeting at best or for the most part nonexistent. Her growing inclination to quickly please or appease others and a sometimes desperate impulse to “smooth things over” (while keeping her true feelings to herself), together with her mother’s ill-advised efforts to take advantage of her looks, made for a dangerous mix. Florence Evelyn’s efforts to satisfy her mother were rarely rewarded with the kind of praise her father had lavished on her. Yet the girl’s youthful naiveté and ambition gave her a sense of self-assurance and determination that were sorely lacking in her mother. The almost-teen wanted badly to be part of “the smart set” and believed that somehow her wishes would come true (in spite of her grandmother’s saying that “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride”).
    In those rare