foliage of her character had been
withered up by this red-hot brand, and had long ago fallen away, leaving a bare
and harsh outline, which might have been repulsive, had she possessed friends or
companions to be repelled by it. Even the attractiveness of her person had
undergone a similar change. It might be partly owing to the studied austerity of
her dress, and partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners. It was a sad
transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either been cut off,
or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock of it ever once
gushed into the sunshine. It was due in part to all these causes, but still more
to something else, that there seemed to be no longer any thing in Hester's face
for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester's form, though majestic and
statue-like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing
in Hester's bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of Affection. Some attribute
had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a
woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the
feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived
through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will
die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or - and
the outward semblance is the same - crushed so deeply into her heart that it can
never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has
once been woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again,
if there were only the magic touch to effect the transfiguration. We shall see
whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched, and so transfigured.
    Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be attributed to
the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and
feeling, to thought. Standing alone in the world, - alone, as to any dependence
on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected, - alone, and
hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it
desirable, - she cast away the fragments of a broken chain. The world's law was
no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly
emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries
before. Men