Throughout all, however, there
was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never
lost; and if in any of her changes, she had grown fainter or
paler, she would have ceased to be herself--it would have been
no longer Pearl!
This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly
express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature
appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but--or else
Hester's fears deceived her--it lacked reference and adaptation
to the world into which she was born. The child could not be
made amenable to rules. In giving her existence a great law had
been broken; and the result was a being whose elements were
perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder, or with an
order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety
and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.
Hester could only account for the child's character--and even
then most vaguely and imperfectly--by recalling what she herself
had been during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing
her soul from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its
material of earth.
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