The Scarlet Letter

"Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester more bitterly than before.

"He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!"

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along

with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their

miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some

mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her

sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the

marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her

as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with

this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven long years, under

the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery

and wrought out no repentance?

The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after

the crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark

light on Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might

not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.

He being gone, she summoned back her child.

"Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?"

Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no

loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer

of herbs. At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully

with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom

forth, and--as it declined to venture--seeking a passage for

herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable

sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was

unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little

boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snailshells,

and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant

in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the

shore. She seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize

of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in

the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam that streaked the

line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze,

scampering after it with winged footsteps to catch the great

snowflakes ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds that

fed and fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up

her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after

these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting

them. One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was

almost sure had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a

broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her

sport, because it grieved her to have done harm to a little

being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl

herself.

Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and

make herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus

assume the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her

mother's gift for devising drapery and costume. As the last

touch to her mermaid's garb, Pearl took some eel-grass and

imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom the decoration

with which she was so familiar on her mother's. A letter--the

letter A--but freshly green instead of scarlet. The child bent

her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with

strange interest, even as if the one only thing for which she

had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.