That wasn't it. Lacking anyone to share a put upon look with she shared it with herself in the mirror. Jumping in to interrupt like that had let the girl play all innocent and turn the whole thing into an even bigger joke, though she had to admit it was decent. Her father would've said 'free books' just to hear her torment when he agreed and said she probably had too many already.
"I've got some skirts for you to try," the girl said, handing them over, "and I've almost got your robes done. People usually go with three or did you want to go with four?"
"Four was too many last year," Hermione said as she scrutinized the skirts to see which seemed most likely to fit. "Even with all the abuse they went through I never had to use all four."
"The house-elves really do a great job up there, don't they?" Marjorie asked. "It was quite a change to graduate and suddenly have to see to my own things. That's one thing they don't teach you there."
"They have house-elves at Hogwarts?" she asked curiously, pausing as she slipped off her periwinkle espadrilles.
"Oh, sure, loads of them," the girl answered as she continued to make muffled noises from the other side of the door. "They're supposed to have the largest number of any place in Britain. All those times I tickled the pear between classes to nick food, I must've seen at least a hundred of them."
"I've never seen them," she said as she quickly shimmied into the chosen skirt to minimize the amount of time she'd be exposed if the door burst open by chance; it looked right on the hanger but turned out to be just a bit short. Looking in the mirror, Hermione thought all those stairs at Hogwarts might have made her butt get bigger.
"Well, they must be busy," Marjorie explained. "The cooking and wash alone for a thousand kids or more is no easy job, then there's cleaning the classrooms, bathrooms, common rooms, and hallways once everyone's gone to bed - they must be having a blast up there, no wonder you can never find one who wants to leave."
Pulling up the next likely skirt, Hermione paused. Was work not just something house-elves needed to survive, but was it also fun: the harder the work the more fun they had? It didn't make any rational sense, but nothing about house-elves did.
"What do you mean, 'tickled the pear'?" she curiously asked as she buttoned up the skirt on one side; zippers were another thing these wizards could use.
"Oh, there's this stairway leading down below the Great Hall," Marjorie said offhandedly. "Just tickle the pear in the bowl of fruit and you're right in the kitchens. Now if you go and gain weight, don't you go blaming me," she finished with a chuckle.
The second skirt worked. It was longer than she liked - several finger-widths below the knee - but she was sure her father wouldn't mind when he became the overprotective father; it was bound to happen at some point. Hermione took it off and got redressed.
"If you don't mind me saying so," the girl from outside said in a carrying whisper, "I feel like I should apologize for Aunt Maggie. We've all heard his story countless times so to us it feels like he's part of the family. I didn't want you to think we were picking on you since you got splashed with a bit of it."
"You mean Harry?" Hermione asked.
"Of course," Marjorie responded. "Aunt Maggie's always been a bit standoffish but now it looks like she's adopted him. If you'd asked me a month ago I'd've said he was like a little brother of mine that's always out of sight somewhere getting into trouble, but now he's stopped by it's more like he's a young cousin who's fun to tease," she said with a smile that was obvious even through the closed door.
Hermione had known Harry was famous and everyone in the wizarding world knew his story, but she had never considered what it was really like. On the one side of the coin were those ridiculous bodice-ripper books, but on the other perhaps people empathized with him even when they didn't know him.
"So, why apologize for 'Aunt Maggie'?" Hermione asked, wondering who this woman could be.
"Oh, you know - 'head over heels,' 'get pricked,' 'bundle of trouble'-"
"Oh!" Hermione exclaimed, suddenly catching on. "'Aunt Maggie' is-"
"Miss Margaret Malkin, the maniacally mad madam of modifying, mending, and manufacturing modern magical material merchandise," she said succinctly.
Hermione paused while drawing on her shoes to look at the door as if she could see the girl beyond it.
"My dad plays that same silly game of aligning any articulation available to assume annoying alliteration," she said finally, her mind working furiously to figure out something to fit; it had always been much harder than she thought it'd be, doing that at the drop of a hat.
"Really?" the girl asked, genuinely surprised again. "Well your hair says you're muggleborn, but I wouldn't be surprised if you've got magical blood in you somewhere down the line. That's the theory anyway, isn't it?"
"You mean the possibility that muggleborns could have a real historical connection to the wizarding world?" Hermione asked as she came out of the changing room with the skirts in hand. "And how would my hair mark me out as a muggleborn?" she asked, glancing into the large mirror again to see what damage the clothes changing had done to her hair.
"That's certainly one way to say it, but it's not like anyone's ever proven it - or really looked into it," Marjorie said as she took the ill-fitting skirts back to their rack and returned with some extra changes of the one she wanted as Hermione tried to flatten her hair a bit.