Paragraph 14 : Melusine And Tracy

The school learned more, this time while outside the classrooms. Slytherin's Melusine Datts and Hufflepuff's Tracy Cobber had teamed up to play the trick on Arthur Fosty and Douglas Poofer. Cobber and Datts had been friends since their second day at Hogwarts. Datts had talked about her disapproval following Fosty's attack on a fellow Slytherin, and Cobber, a Hufflepuff who valued loyalty more than hard work, felt the betrayal still more disgusting than most Slytherins. Both had agreed that they had to do something to send the two lazy, cynical boys a simple message : take care of your own defects instead of looking down on the others because you feel they have some. Given that the main defects of the two boys translated into cheating at essays, the two girls had decided to leverage this vile habit in order to exact revenge on behalf of Ann. The general opinion among Hufflepuffs when they caught wind of this backstory was that Cobber had acted in a spiritful, decent and generous way, and that her Slytherin friend had done the right thing. Reactions were more mixed in the Slytherin Common Room. Besides Fosty and Poofer who were already plotting their own revenge, some considered that things had gone too far, and that neither Cobber nor Datts should have entered this cycle of vendettas. A bigger number of Slytherins thought that Fosty and Poofer had gotten what they deserved. Yes, Slytherins traditionally valued resourcefulness over ethics, high goals over respectable means, but choosing the fast and easy track all the time would not cut it. This was actually a very prevalent opinion among the Slytherins who had a strong penchant for dark magic. Their mindset revolved around the notion that to achieve great things, having a deep knowledge and understanding of both ordinary and dark magic was necessary, and that therefore it was indispensable to study seriously. Good marks without cheating tricks were the path towards the satisfaction of their ambitions. After all, Lord Voldemort had been an excellent student at Hogwarts, possibly the best in decades. And disparaging the others was in their mind a useless tactic. Many of them were convinced that the best representatives of dark magic, especially Lord Voldemort and Gellert Grindelwald, had failed because they had underestimated the ordinary magic of do-gooders.