No, she was not alright, and she almost said as much when the man asked her. Except she would have to explain herself if she told him, and he would probably think it was silly. The man who'd stopped next to her was a stranger (or so she imagined; she was not particularly good at keeping track of faces and names from social events and so could not be entirely confident she had never met him previously), and even those who knew her well and put up with many of her little eccentricities with a good-natured smile would have agreed that this was silly.

Juliana determined to compose herself and shrug the man off and go about her business, but could not quite manage it. The disappointment of missing her blackberry jam had rolled over to this new unexpected setback and it was just too much. Jules was good at handling big things with optimism or at least grace — her expulsion from Hogwarts, deaths in the extended family, catastrophes, rejections — but two small things at the same time was beyond her capacity for recovery, at least for the moment. There was nothing for it but to explain herself and let the man think what he would of her.

"They've gotten rid of my little bakery booth," she explained with anguish. "Every time I come, I buy a little bundle of biscuits — they put them in a little bag tied with pink ribbon, and they've icing around the edges — and now there's —" she gesticulated helplessly towards the butcher stall. "There's just this instead."