Hermione Granger was a very clever witch, but when she was still a first-year, she had been all alone. She had even hidden in the girls' bathroom during the Halloween feast and cried by herself. Like Myrtle, she had encountered a monster. Though a Troll did not have a Basilisk's deadly venom or gaze, it was still very dangerous.
Besides being a "know-it-all," she also loved correcting others. Older people could never resist criticizing the young and trying to "correct" them. Though Hermione was young, in any case, restraining the urge to correct others was no easy matter.
Who did not want to become a third-place scholar before thirty? Who did not want to be like Dorian Gray, with ageless beauty and immense wealth, able to live out an entire life without a care?
Even Mrs. Borski, a widow who had diligently managed her business in her youth, could not resist buying Potions from wizards that could restore her youthful appearance—she had been quite beautiful when she was young; she had merely grown old. For that, she had even been willing to invest her considerable fortune in the seemingly hopeless Belgian Industrial Promotion Bank.
Muggles worshipped vampires, granting the monsters from old black-and-white horror films tragic, alluring identities. They fantasized that vampires could share their immortal power through an "embrace," and willingly offered up their blood and money to sustain them. Only when that illusion was exposed did they abandon the vampires, just as they no longer believed in the Fountain of Youth or the Philosopher's Stone, placing their "hope" in other, "more reliable" places.
First, America's trust industry had been imported from Britain in 1818. Although American trust business had shifted from individual trustees to corporate trustees fifty years earlier than Britain, Britain's earliest law concerning trusts, the "Statute