“Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.

“It makes me feel as if something had hit me,” Sara had told Ermengarde once in confidence. “And as if I want to hit back. I have to remember things quickly to keep from saying something ill-tempered.”

I think the passage struck me as a child reader because it was the first time I saw someone else describe the confusion of changing gears between intense inner focus and awareness of the outside world, which was troublesome for me then (and still is, more often than I’d like to admit).

It’s difficult to access that state, sometimes, in a world that values multitasking so highly. I’ve never been under the impression that I can successfully multitask— it feels more like juggling, trying to switch between the tasks at hand quickly enough not to let one drop by leaving it unattended for a moment too long. For the kid who could get lost in a book so deeply that she didn’t hear her mother calling from three feet away, that kind of divided attention is stressful!