Snape,Harry and the Pensieves

[Wanda Sherratt]

No: HPFGUIDX 79853

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "sylviablundell2001" 
<sylviablundell at a...> wrote:
> Sarah wrote:
> Snape made a point of taking out the pensieve, removing some 
thoughts 
> from his head and transferring them to the pensieve in front of 
> Harry. That's like taking out a diary in front of another person, 
> writing something in front of them, and putting it away.
> 
> Surely Snape is unaware that Harry has any previous knowledge of 
> pensieves or their function. To him, itwould be like leaving his 
> diary in the same room as an illiterate person who would have no 
idea 
> of how to use it. If he had known that Harry knew exactly what a 
> pensieve was, I doubt if he would have left him alone with it.
> Sylvia (who keeps a rather uninteresting diary, but would hate 
anyone 
> nosing into it).

As I recall, though, this was the SECOND time Harry had been left 
alone with Snape's Pensieve-thoughts.  The first time was when they 
heard Prof. Trelawney screaming in the hall upstairs, and Snape left 
suddenly to deal with the emergency.  Harry waited for a moment, and 
then followed him.  I was filling in the backstory for myself, of 
course, but I thought that Snape must have realized after returning 
to his office that he'd left the Pensieve unattended, and yet Harry 
had not snooped in it.  So when the second occasion came about, he 
left and assumed that Harry would behave the same way.  So he would 
have been DOUBLY angry when he returned and found Harry looking in 
the Pensieve; the invasion of privacy was bad enough, but he must 
have felt like he'd been made a fool of because he'd actually 
trusted Harry to behave properly.  Someone like Snape would be 
really infuriated to think that he'd been tricked into letting his 
guard down; it would just reinforce his bad opinion of Harry.

Wanda