During my colleagues, there are so many superexcellent ones, trickish ones, adulatory ones, who are doing better than me, and I have fallen to a walk-on.
As always, she wondered how her loud, insensitive father had managed to marry a woman like her mother, for never were two people further apart in birth, breeding and habits of mind.
I have had to use every ounce of cunning I possess, so that my hand would not be detectable in your success. Dumbledore would have been very suspicious if you had managed everything too easily.
For the real-life working man, women were only a source of amusement - but a dangerous one: with women one always had to be cunning or else they would get the upper hand and ruin one's life.
As to you saying that she's after me, I don't like such a remark about her, for it implies a scheming woman, and a man worth scheming for, both of which are not only untrue, but ludicrously untrue, of this case.