Sera was immediately pleased with herself; she'd gotten him to smile at her, even if he did not look confident about it. She smirked back at him. "People want to donate to them but they don't want to look at them," Sera said, still in that flippant tone. "And isn't that what their parents did in the first place?"

Parents, or other relatives — the children in the home were tragic and abandoned, and Seraphina thought it was a shame that they did not even get to have fun at a mild ball.

She took a sip of her drink, as if to punctuate the sentence.