Of course, Tom Riddle kills Moaning Myrtle with the basilisk, a creature with an insatiable lust to kill, using the resulting tear to make the Diarycrux. But is the super-sensitive Moaning Myrtle really in the wrong place at the wrong time? Moaning Myrtle certainly likes to check out any available boys, and Tom Riddle, at the age of sixteen, is still handsome. When she fled to the girls' bathroom, having been hurt by Olive Hornby's teasing, perhaps Moaning Myrtle heard too many recitals of that old witticism: "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses." 15 Her ghost later haunts the Prefect's bathroom to ogle Cedric, the handsome Hufflepuff champion, as well as admire Harry's own physique. Later still, Myrtle even invades the boy's bathroom to comfort Draco Malfoy. Myrtle's most entertaining moment as a ghost is when she notices that Hermione has sprouted cat's whiskers and a tail, and it is telling that Moaning Myrtle considers a dead Harry would be "welcome to share [her] toilet." 16 Even Moaning Myrtle's very name suggests an overwhelming absorption with lusty teenage romance.

We know that Tom, like Gilderoy Lockhart, is already a dab hand at Memory Charms. In Tom Riddle's case, the use of a Memory Charm later allows him to escape responsibility for his actions when he charms his Uncle Morfin or Hokey to take the blame for later murders. So Tom could have erased Moaning Myrtle's memory, but instead chose to kill her as his first Horcrux victim.

Tom's other skills include Legilimency, and how to possess people, even without their knowledge. And we know that he would find any of Moaning Myrtle's romantic overtures irksome, even if he went along with them, knowing how to charm people. Tom, a heartless bully, who lusts to control all others in getting his own way, and who fears being found out, would consider Myrtle the perfect victim to pick for his first experiment in making a Horcrux. How disastrous would it be for Tom if a rejected Myrtle, whose moaning about the way she has been treated is legendary, exposed to the rest of Hogwarts that "Tom Riddle, poor but brilliant, parentless but so brave, school prefect, model student' 17 had been habitually hanging around a girls' bathroom, to unleash a basilisk on other students?18

After all, Ginny also fears expulsion when she realises she was possessed by Tom Riddle's Diarycrux to slaughter roosters, daub slogans and release the basilisk out of its chamber. This was all because she wrote in the diary Lucius passed on to her, which she thought was "a friend [¦] in my pocket." 19 Within the Diary's pages, Ginny confides her own loneliness at school, how she is teased by her brothers, and her own childish notions of romance, fanned by the DADA teacher Gilderoy Lockhart's imprudent emphasis on fame and St. Valentine's Day's superficial charm.

But the Diarycrux revenant, so like Lockhart, is really a user and a manipulator who makes much of Ginny's crush on the famous Harry Potter and drags her down to the Chamber of Secrets, sapping her essence for his own ends. Tom doesn't care about anyone's feelings, only lusting for the power to escape his diary to kill both Ginny and Harry. Appropriately it is Harry, as the chaste rescuer of his "best friend's sister' 20 who summons the Sword of Gryffindor and destroys the Diarycrux on Ginny's behalf. Amidst Lockhart's romantic posturing and fraud, the romantic worries of Ginny are linked with the death of the lustful Moaning Myrtle, because of the murderously lustful piece of Lord Voldemort's soul placed in a young man's diary. Harry, the loyal hero of Ginny's Valentine, truly defeats the Diarycrux theme of lust, with its opposing virtues of prudence and chastity, to eventually find true love with Ginny.