Minerva had led her into Diagon Alley, her bony, ancient hand folded over Hermione’s soft, twelve-year-old one, and shown her shops selling wands and broomsticks and kneazles and owls. Hermione had stared at all of it, wide-eyed and wondrous, and fallen in love with it, with its whimsy, its beauty, its fairytale-essence; and when Minerva had deposited her back on her Kensington doorstep and turned around by the little gate separating her parents’ front garden from the cobblestone street to wink at Hermione, actually wink  at her from under her giant, green-velvet hat, Hermione had fallen in love with Minerva, too.