England's just fine. Rainy, actually. Catherine's present favorite activity is stomping in puddles.

Aww.

Miranda realizes that she never told Timothy about the mentoring thing! She corrects this oversight.

"That's very clever and I'm glad you've found it so rewarding. - might work with boys. I think the failure modes might be worse with boys."

"Yeah. I figure it might spread but I'm just trying to establish it with the girls."

"Have a Muggleborn radar or are you getting lucky?"

"Stoller everybody knew, no luck."

"And Fawley, what, charmed Aranea into playing along? At age eleven? I don't know that I could have pulled that."

"I don't know the contents of the conversation in detail."

"It would presumably be rude to ask. Still. Clever kid. I remember that whole scandal, it was very exciting."

"I was too young to be paying attention at the time, what was it like?"

"Uh, she had a match arranged with Marcellus Fawley and ran off with his little brother eve of the wedding, both families disowned the merry young lovers, then it turned out Marcellus had a secret child with Mildred Greensbauer and the families reached out to possibly reconcile and were told to go fuck themselves..."

"Wow."

"I console myself that Michael comparatively barely caused a stir."

"It helps that the family didn't make a fuss, although people in Slytherin were debating whether they ought to have done as sort of a deterrent and Aaron was saying that Michael should incur more of the costs of being Michael."

"I would've been fairly irritated with him if he'd blown up my engagement or something, and he easily could have done, but - someday we're just going to have to fix the thing where stepping out of line ruins your siblings' lives, and while I don't think conspicuously stepping out of line is the way to achieve that I also don't think punishing it helps any."

"I was saying that if you went around threatening to disown your kids all the time they might start ignoring you on the supposition it'd happen eventually anyhow, and someone said 'but there's nothing worse than marrying a Muggle', and I said sure there is your daughter could turn up pregnant out of wedlock or your son could run off with a veela."

"Or your daughter could bring a girl home, or..."

"I think a number of families would react to that with deliberate obliviousness, honestly, but yeah."

"That's probably the kindest thing they could do, really." Sigh. "But there are plenty of families who have what look like loving constructive relationships with their kids with no disowning in sight and then the kid crosses an invisible line, and I'm not sure that's any kinder than being straightforward about your willingness to sever branches of the family tree for misbehavior."

"I suppose I'd be optimistic that if the relationships were constructive the lines wouldn't be invisible, the kids would be able to ask - no?"

"Sure, but you fall in love, write home, get a hard no..."

Nod.

"Shouldn't be less tractable than the Statute but I admit not really knowing where to start."

"Well, being nice to Michael sets a good example, s'pose."

"They're expecting, did you hear?"