At the boarding school attended by the author in Denmark, Christina is, like the author, a foreign student, visiting from Sweden. In the first, pre-Christmas term, their relationship is one of mutual interest and attraction. In the second term, however, the author portrays her as having become obsessed with him, to the point where he feels he has to back away from the once sexually promising relationship. There is the sense, never quite referred to explicitly, that as the result of a certain wariness that seems to have been the result of his relationship with Christina, the author begins to "come of age" when it comes to relationships with women in general.