It was like a mask; or,
rather like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features;
owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was
actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had
departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.
It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression
unseen before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now;
unless some preternaturally gifted observer should have first
read the heart, and have afterwards sought a corresponding
development in the countenance and mien. Such a spiritual seer
might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the
multitude through several miserable years as a necessity, a
penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure,
she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and
voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony
into a kind of triumph. "Look your last on the scarlet letter
and its wearer!"--the people's victim and lifelong bond-slave,
as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and
she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer and the deep,
mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which
ye have caused to burn on her bosom!" Nor were it an
inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature,
should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester's mind, at the
moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which
had been thus deeply incorporated with her being.
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