All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by
inalienable right, out of Hester's heart. Mother and daughter
stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human
society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated
those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before
Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the
softening influences of maternity.
At home, within and around her mother's cottage, Pearl wanted
not a wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life
went forth from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated
itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame
wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials--a stick,
a bunch of rags, a flower--were the puppets of Pearl's
witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became
spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her
inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary
personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged,
black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy
utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure
as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their
children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted most unmercifully.
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