How soon- with what strange rapidity, indeed!- did Pearl arrive at an age that was capable of social intercourse, beyond the mother's ever-ready smile and nonsense-words!And then what a happiness would it have been, could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, birdlike voice minglingwith the uproarof other childish voices, and have distinguished and unravelledher own darling's tones, amid all the entangledoutcry of a group of sportivechildren! But this could never be. Pearl was a born outcastof the infantileworld. An impof evil, emblemand 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 inviolablecircle 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 forefingerwith 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 grassymargin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grimfashion as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance; or at scourgingQuakers; or taking scalpsin a sham-fight with the Indians; or scaring one another with freaks of imitativewitchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her punywrath, snatching up stones to flingat them, with shrill, incoherentexclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a witch's anathemasin some unknown tongue.
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