How _can_ Pearl have a blemish, when there's no one but herself to judge Herself? Of course she'll be immaculate, even if, like Cleopatra, she drowns a lover a night in her dirty Nile. The Nilus Flux of her love. Candida! By Hawthorne's day it was already Pearl. Before swine, of course. There never yet was a Pearl that wasn't cast before swine. It's part of her game, part of her pearl-dom. Because when Circe lies with a man, _he's_ a swine after it, if he wasn't one before. Not _she._ Circe is the great white impeccable Pearl. And yet, oh. Pearl, there's a Nemesis even for you. There's a Doom, Pearl. Doom! What a beautiful northern word. Doom. The Doom of the Pearl. Who will write that Allegory? Here's what the Doom is, anyhow. When you don't have a Divine Father to sin against: and when you don't sin against the Son; which the Pearls don't, because they all are very strong on LOVE, stronger on LOVE than on anything: then there's nothing left for you to sin against except the Holy Ghost. Now, Pearl, come, let's drop you in the vinegar. And it's a ticklish thing sinning against the Holy Ghost. "It shall not be forgiven him." Didn't I tell you there was Doom. _It shall not be forgiven her._ The Father forgives: the Son forgives: but the Holy Ghost does _not_ forgive. So take that. The Holy Ghost doesn't forgive because the Holy Ghost is within you. The Holy Ghost is you: your very You. So if, in your conceit of your ego, you make a break in your own YOU, in your own integrity, how can you be forgiven? You might as well make a rip in your own bowels. You _know_ if you rip your own bowels they will go rotten and _you_ will go rotten. And there's an end of you: in the body. The same if you make a breach with your own Holy Ghost. You go soul-rotten. Like the Pearls. These dear Pearls, they do anything they like, and remain pure. Oh, purity! But they can't stop themselves from going rotten inside. Rotten Pearls, fair outside. Their _souls_ smell, because their souls are putrefying inside them. The sin against the Holy Ghost. And gradually, from within outwards, they rot. Some form of dementia. A thing disintegrating. A decomposing psyche. Dementia. _Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius._ Watch these Pearls, these Pearls of modern women. Particularly American women. Battening on love. And fluttering in the first bat-like throes of dementia. You _can_ have your cake and eat it. But my God, it will go rotten inside you. Hawthorne's other books are nothing compared to _The Scarlet Letter._ But there are good parables, and wonderful dark glimpses of early Puritan America, in _Twice Told Tales._