But this could never be. Pearl was a born
outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and
product of sin, she had no right among christened infants.
Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed,
with which the child comprehended her loneliness: the destiny
that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her: the whole
peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to other
children. Never since her release from prison had Hester met the
public gaze without her. In all her walks about the town, Pearl,
too, was there: first as the babe in arms, and afterwards as the
little girl, small companion of her mother, holding a forefinger
with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate of three or
four footsteps to one of Hester's. She saw the children of the
settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the
domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions
as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to
church, perchance, or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in
a sham fight with the Indians, or scaring one another with
freaks of imitative witchcraft.
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