If you should like it, I would give you some happy distraction before you must meet with this Mr. Whitling. I am feeling considerable ire on your account, for all it isn't my place. The whole of our last year at Hogwarts stripped each and every student of any child that remained, and there was no Professor Carrow to orchestrate what happened that night. All was willful, and even if mislead, leniency of this kind... I could not support. The reformation of character must first come with an understanding of that character, a confrontation of deed and intention.
I am sorry. I really haven't anything to say about Joseph that I could feel justified in writing for all I might write of it anyway, but I think you should know that I am conflicted. I think these feelings, the memories of what happened, must come out of me someday, if not in a book than in another form. I cannot go on all my days living with the weight of every shared and secret horror. Perhaps Zelma had more interest in what happened at Hogwarts than she let on, if she accepted me when she did. For her this is all one great war with a breath held in between, and in the scope of her research, I cannot disagree with this view. As for my being qualified... I cannot think of many who would wish my voice to be the one heard, if any at all. Certainly I do not wish it.
And now I am thinking myself perfectly of a mind to agree to any request made in kindness. I cannot promise I will not blink.
Tomorrow evening Zelma and I are dining with several of the distinguished scholars of Berlin for a far more formal evening than you had your last in Portugal. I shall retire sober and sore from stiff, half-understood conversation, and Apparate home in the morning. While I know better than to want to see you very soon after, I will admit I would rather ignore such inclinations than suffer failing to act because of them.
This does not make me a gentle woman, I think.
Anxiously,
Padma
5 December 1998
Dear Theodore,
If you should like it, I would give you some happy distraction before you must meet with this Mr. Whitling. I am feeling considerable ire on your account, for all it isn't my place. The whole of our last year at Hogwarts stripped each and every student of any child that remained, and there was no Professor Carrow to orchestrate what happened that night. All was willful, and even if mislead, leniency of this kind... I could not support. The reformation of character must first come with an understanding of that character, a confrontation of deed and intention.
I am sorry. I really haven't anything to say about Joseph that I could feel justified in writing for all I might write of it anyway, but I think you should know that I am conflicted. I think these feelings, the memories of what happened, must come out of me someday, if not in a book than in another form. I cannot go on all my days living with the weight of every shared and secret horror. Perhaps Zelma had more interest in what happened at Hogwarts than she let on, if she accepted me when she did. For her this is all one great war with a breath held in between, and in the scope of her research, I cannot disagree with this view. As for my being qualified... I cannot think of many who would wish my voice to be the one heard, if any at all. Certainly I do not wish it.
And now I am thinking myself perfectly of a mind to agree to any request made in kindness. I cannot promise I will not blink.
Tomorrow evening Zelma and I are dining with several of the distinguished scholars of Berlin for a far more formal evening than you had your last in Portugal. I shall retire sober and sore from stiff, half-understood conversation, and Apparate home in the morning. While I know better than to want to see you very soon after, I will admit I would rather ignore such inclinations than suffer failing to act because of them.