"I heard tickets for this match were expensive, and hard to get, too?" Bill Weasley said, sounding a little surprised.
"Bill, you still haven't gotten used to the fact that our family has plenty of money now," Ginny said with a pursed-lip smile.
This was Harry's first time meeting Bill Weasley, whom he had heard Ron and the others talk about so often.
How could he put it? Bill was nothing like he had imagined.
Ron and the others had said Bill was the eldest brother in the family and had done extremely well at school. A prefect, Head Boy, and twelve Outstandings on his Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests.
Gringotts had recognized his talent, given him special training, and posted him to Egypt.
Gringotts very rarely hired wizards, after all. Catching their eye was considerably harder than getting into the Ministry of Magic. Of course, the pay at Gringotts was correspondingly much higher than at the Ministry.
The year before last, when the Weasley family had not been nearly as well-off as they were now, Ron had wanted to study Magical Automata. Simply because of Ron's excellent performance concerning the Basilisk, Bill had been so pleased that he had bought him quite a few books and a low-grade Magical Automaton prototype.
Books in the Wizarding World were extraordinarily expensive, after all. To keep Muggles from reading them, these books all had special magic cast on them, so that Muggles saw nothing but a tangled mess when they looked at them.
Low-grade Magical Automata were expensive, too. Being able to spend so freely was proof enough that Bill had deep pockets.
With all that in mind, Harry had always pictured Bill as a bigger version of Percy. But when he actually met Bill, he discovered that was not the case at