The Unattended Walk From the Prison Door

"Perhaps there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from the thresholds of the prison than even in the procession and spectacle that had been described," he writes. "Then, she was supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves and by all the combative energy of her character which enabled her to convert the scene into a kind of lurid triumph." The young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast, at her, the child of the honorable parents,. At her, the mother of the babe that would hereafter be a woman, at her who had once been innocent as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.

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