Susan Delgado's aunt and guardian, a thin, disapproving woman who brokered Susan's arrangement with Mayor Thorin and considers the resulting financial security ample compensation for whatever moral compromises were involved in producing it. Cordelia manipulated her young niece into accepting the gilly compact through a careful sequence of tears, appeals to Susan's dead father's memory, and gentle reminders of who would otherwise be turned out of the house. She grows steadily more bitter and quarrelsome with Susan as the arrangement progresses, and the household begins to take on the atmosphere of a long, slow, polite siege.