“Would you see what I caught this child devouring! Sitting with the gas blinding her and her eyes popping over this terrible story by somebody named Hawthorne. The title alone is enough to make a decent girl run from it. _The Scarlet Letter._ Do you know what the letter was and what it stood for?” RoBards shook his head. He did not read light, popular fiction. The affidavits he handled were fiction enough for him. Patty drew him into another room and whispered the plot of the story. RoBards gathered that it had to do with a Puritan minister who had a secret affair with the wife of an absent citizen, and with the child that resulted in the mother’s very proper appearance in the pillory. “They ought to put the author there and sew a letter on his lapel.” Patty raged. “No wonder the people of Salem put him out of office and drove him out of town.” There had been an article in the _Church Review_ about the book. Patty fetched it and read a few lines to RoBards: “Is the French era actually begun in our literature? We wonder what he would be at: whether he is making fun of all religion. Shelley himself never imagined a more dissolute conversation than that in which the polluted minister comforts himself with the thought that the revenge of the injured husband is worse than his own sin in instigating it.... The lady’s frailty is philosophized into a natural and easy result of the Scriptural law of marriage.” That his daughter should read of such things sent a cold thrill into RoBards’ heart. He forgot that she had no innocence to destroy. Jud Lasher had wrecked that. Ernest Chirnside had rejected her for its lack. And he himself had watched her dance. But the printed word had a peculiar damnation. He knew that wickedness was rife everywhere about him. He knew that Immy knew it, for the gossip was everywhere like the atmosphere. The newspapers blazoned it. The courthouses solemnized it. Yet to print it in a story seemed infamous. And Patty added: “I found her crying over it! Crying her heart out over that woman and her brat! What can we do to save that child?” “Ah, what can we do,” RoBards groaned, “to save ourselves?” There was something in his look that checked Patty’s ire, made her blench, shiver, and walk away. Perhaps she was thinking of—of what RoBards dared not remember. That night RoBards was wakened from sleep by a bewildering dream of someone sobbing. He woke and heard sobs. They had invaded his slumber and coerced the dream. He sat up and looked about. Patty undressed and freezing had glanced into the purloined romance; and it had fastened on her. She was weeping over Hester Prynne and her child Pearl, and Dimmesdale, the wretched partner in their expiation.