Woe narrows her eyes and widens her stance, irritation boiling off her like water poured over red hot metal.

“I will not be spoken to this way,” a third time today, “You step aside, brat - or you will learn a sharp lesson in respect for your elders.”

She is painfully and acutely aware of the pathetic mess this is already, challenging some awful little creature in a dirty alley in yesterday’s rumpled clothes with the tang of sour spit in her mouth, but to concede would be worse.