"Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester more bitterly than before.
"He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!"
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along
with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their
miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some
mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her
sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the
marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her
as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with
this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven long years, under
the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery
and wrought out no repentance?
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The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after
the crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark
light on Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might
not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.
He being gone, she summoned back her child.
"Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?"
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