那天晚上，克里斯汀·哈特曼（Christine Hartmann）上床睡觉，她从闲逛庄园的许多书中拿走了一本书。从小就开始发展独自一人的艺术，通常更喜欢自己的公司而不是其他任何人的公司。她以巨大的速度阅读书籍，并完全根据他们将她从材料周围的环境中删除的能力。在她生命中最不幸的日子里，她能够通过暂时生活在别人的生活中，而在两到三场比赛中，她太沮丧而无法集中精力，无法荒凉。
(That night Christine Hartmann went to bed with a book she had taken from among the many that lay strewn around the Manor. From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else's. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on their ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else's, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.)