"The ones I wore out walking. The ugliest ones were best for walking, the best-looking fell apart. The stylists would talk about them, because I’d show up in them, at shoots. Talk about how the business worked. The factories in China, Vietnam. The big companies. And I’d started to imagine ones that weren’t ugly at all, that didn’t fall apart. But somehow," and she smiled ruefully, "untainted by fashion. I’d started doing drawings. Very bad ones. But I’d already decided that I really wanted to understand shoes, their history, how they work, before I tried to do anything. Not that conscious a decision, but a decision. So I applied to Cordwainers, was accepted, moved to London. Or rather, simply stopped moving. In London. I may just have been enamored of the idea of waking up in the same town every day, but I had my mission, the mystery runners that I couldn’t quite imagine."