Hermione has found out that she is really a pureblood and is having some trouble adjusting.
There's a blur of space and time each Tuesday, swathed in pink lace, ruffles and silk. Beset on all sides with tea and buns and mindless chatter to fill the void where substance should sit. It seems so odd, so displaced that she should exist, at any rate, within these moments, given that she hardly feels them at all.
There's a tray with tea and bright, oddly colored cakes; some have not touched them, others have eaten more than their fair share, and others still eat well, but add a little something extra to their tea. All present sit witness, but no remarks are made. There are drugs and alcohol, and there is food, too much or too little, with which to dull the senses. She herself has tried 'too little', and found that it fits well. There is a comfortable numb that exists, between hunger (self, need) and denial of hunger (denial of self and need) for which they all; the starved, the bloated, the drunk and the high, struggle to achieve and then maintain. It is perhaps their only grounds for comradery.
They speak of fashion, of make-up and shagging, of whom went up to the astronomy tower with whom and, finally, their pathology is laid bare. They speak of others, whatever else it is always of others. To talk about ones self is to acknowledge that one has a self to speak of, which is something they are trying desperately to forget. Better never to have had a self at all than suffer its eradication during marriage.
She lifts her eyes from the patterned, disgustingly expensive silk atop her thighs and is stained. They all look and reek of infiri. Hollowed shells of those who would become people, had not the decomposition of the stifled set in. Commanded perhaps, by a cheshire cat all their own, to sit to tea with Alice. we're all mad here
She laughs out loud but nobody notices.
She spends too much time watching her hands shake.