"Bloody hell!!!!"
Ron clutched his head, his eyes nearly bulging out as he shouted in despair:
"Zhang, this is what you meant when you said your house was tiny? Smaller than the Burrow?"
Back when they had chatted in their first year, Ron had complained several times after seeing that everything Harry and Zhang Xiao used was brand-new.
Zhang went without saying. Even Hermione's things were at least all new, while Harry had gone all out with a snowy owl-the equivalent of a top-of-the-line phone.
So Ron had felt terribly inferior: crowded rooms, mediocre grades, secondhand belongings. The main reason, though, was that Arthur and Molly had so many children that they had overlooked Ron's feelings.
Both Zhang Xiao and Harry had tried to comfort him.
Harry had offered his own example. "Ron, I used to live in a cupboard, you know-the storage space under the stairs. They didn't let me have the room where Dudley kept his junk until second year."
Zhang Xiao had done the same, telling Ron with utter sincerity:
"My house isn't big either. It's in a working-class neighborhood in London, and it's smaller than a single floor of your house. Apart from being clean, it's all pretty ordinary. We barely even have any electrical appliances, just a black-and-white television from a secondhand market."
Seeing the sincerity written all over Zhang Xiao's face, Ron had believed him.
But during the summer after first year, Zhang Xiao had moved. It was a big house, certainly, but only someone with a screw loose would go around announcing that they had moved.
It had been a minor incident. Who would remember it?
Now, though, judging by Ron's expression, the size of the house was directly proportional to the depth of his sorrow.
Lucius's manor was no smaller, but how