The Scarlet Letter

In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester

Prynne was shocked at the condition to which she found the

clergyman reduced. His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His

moral force was abased into more than childish weakness. It

grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his intellectual

faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps

acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given

them. With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from

all others, she could readily infer that, besides the legitimate

action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been

brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale's

well-being and repose. Knowing what this poor fallen man had

once been, her whole soul was moved by the shuddering terror

with which he had appealed to her--the outcast woman--for

support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She decided,

moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little

accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her

ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself,

Hester saw--or seemed to see--that there lay a responsibility

upon her in reference to the clergyman, which she owned to no

other, nor to the whole world besides. The links that united her

to the rest of humankind--links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or

whatever the material--had all been broken. Here was the iron

link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like

all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.

Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in

which we beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy.

Years had come and gone. Pearl was now seven years old. Her

mother, with the scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in its

fantastic embroidery, had long been a familiar object to the

townspeople. As is apt to be the case when a person stands out

in any prominence before the community, and, at the same time,

interferes neither with public nor individual interests and

convenience, a species of general regard had ultimately grown up

in reference to Hester Prynne. It is to the credit of human

nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play,

it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and

quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the

change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the

original feeling of hostility. In this matter of Hester Prynne

there was neither irritation nor irksomeness. She never battled

with the public, but submitted uncomplainingly to its worst

usage; she made no claim upon it in requital for what she

suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies. Then, also, the

blameless purity of her life during all these years in which she

had been set apart to infamy was reckoned largely in her favour.

With nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no

hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining anything, it could only

be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought back the poor

wanderer to its paths.