We may speak further of it hereafter.
Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her
infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on
wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently
insulted the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she
might readily have applied to the better efforts of her art, she
employed in making coarse garments for the poor. It is probable
that there was an idea of penance in this mode of occupation,
and that she offered up a real sacrifice of enjoyment in
devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She had in her
nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic--a taste for
the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite
productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all the
possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon. Women derive
a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate
toil of the needle. To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode
of expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life.
Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin. This morbid
meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it
is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but
something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong
beneath.
Pages:
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136