Dodonus announced he was buying the mirror he'd just been looking at, and Ford raised an eyebrow. He almost asked why, thinking that perhaps Tycho had some inventive purpose in mind for it, but stopped himself. Rich people didn't really need reasons to buy things, he remembered. They could just do things like this on a whim — or if not on a whim, then at least with far less care and planning than Ford spent painstakingly balancing the monthly budget for the Greengrass household.

He had barely recovered from the strangeness of watching someone make an impulse purchase when Dodonus called him beautiful. It was almost certainly just one of Dodonus' strange turns of phrase, and he probably didn't mean anything by it, but it made Ford's cheeks color all the same. He was beginning to think this call was going to be a little more complicated than he'd anticipated, even if he found nothing out of the ordinary. Tycho Dodonus complicated matters just by existing in the same shop.

Ford cleared his throat and tried to focus on the matter at hand. He privately agreed with Dodonus and Williams' assessment of the cruelty of spirit mirrors, but that wasn't the official Ministry line, so he felt he had to say something in response. "Well, they do have a permit to sell them," he pointed out, but very weakly — it was clear his heart wasn't in the defense of spirit mirrors as a concept, much less their particular use here in this shady Knockturne shop. "I'm just supposed to make sure they're operating under the terms of their license, not confiscate them, or anything."

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