"Be my guest."

This time he doesn't arrange any pretenses. "How're you doing?"

Holding murtlap essence to his jaw. "Fine."

"I can tell when people're lying to me even when they're good at it, you know."

"Randomly assaulted for looking around the room, and you?"

"Interested in preventing that. Potter doesn't want to give anyone detention if you don't go down to the hospital wing over it."

"I don't solve my problems with violence."

"I commend that. How're you solving them instead?"

"I tried your spell, fat lot of good that did."

"You've been avoiding calling your classmates Mudbloods and so on?"

"That's a word, not an argument, I don't use it," he says, with the air of someone who stopped using it last June.

"Good for you. Did you tell Corner that you'd realized the thing you said to set him off wasn't true?"

"I was going to but then he hit me for looking at him, I'm not going anywhere near him if I can help it!"

"That sounds awkward, you sleep in the same room. Want to do it while I'm around so he can be prevented from punching you?"

"Fine."

"A consequence of your style of learning new things is that people might think you still believe the old, wrong things you said unless you tell them otherwise. If it's going to be really hard to tell people when you've changed your mind, you might be more careful about what you say in the first place."

"I told Phelps. She doesn't hit people."

"What'd she say?"

"She said that if people are worried about wizarding numbers it's better to have four halfbloods out of a witch and a wizard than two purebloods. And she has a point too."

"She does. And there's some evidence it's not healthy to only marry distant cousins, if you breed animals that way you get ones with all kinds of weird fragilities since there's no new blood to balance them out."

"Sure - I'm reasonable when people talk to me -"

"You are. You're reasonable even when they don't, really, it's good of you to try to keep Corner out of trouble. But he doesn't know you're reasonable yet."

"He's stupid."

"If someone said your parents were together because of potions or worse, you'd probably be less than pleased with them."

"I wouldn't hit them."