He colors (which doesn't happen very often anymore, happily), and says, rather lamely, "Oh, I see. Er, yes, that's true."
"I may have failed to accurately convey," he says drolly, "how badly your counterpart wasted his potential, or the sourness of the note on which we met, or the sheer scale of his... let me put it this way, the Princes are, at best, bar sinister on the Nigellus branch, if that, and I was raised under adverse, even squalid conditions, and even I couldn't fail to see that his pretensions to class weren't even capable ones. Rodolphus was never elegant, as we think of serpents, but he was... competent, and genuine, and certain of his direction, and so confident in himself that he scarcely had to bother with the alpha-snake displays the common room was rife with. Not a cobra, but a boa. He enjoyed life, he attacked the cause with joy. And he didn't actually break my arm," he adds as an afterthought, smiling.