She hadn't answered his question about suffrage, but he didn't plan to ask again. Maybe she was a little embarrassed about the answer, because letting everyone vote was quite obviously a recipe for disaster. Maybe she didn't actually know and was trying to avoid seeming ignorant by letting on that she wasn't as well informed about this interest as she implied. In any case, he'd fit her into the archetype of quirky but harmless based on her enthusiasm about Muggle politics and avoiding the question left plenty of room for her within that particular box. If she'd been interested in magical politics, he might have found an excuse to go talk to someone else; he had political opinions but thought they were best kept to the walls of his club, not discussed with women at parties. Muggle politics, though — well, who would bother to have opinions on that in the first place? She might as well have said she was quite invested in the crossbreeding of peonies, for all the practical real-world applicability this particular pursuit had.

"Oh, I have plenty of interests — all of them boring," he joked. This was a paradoxical statement on the surface of things; what he meant was that these subjects were fascinating to him but he anticipated they would be boring to most debutantes. "Lately it's been advanced mathematics and arithmancy."

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