It was not soon that he risked an attempt to please her with a song of
his own. There was just enough unconscious truth in him to make him a
little afraid of Hester. Commonplace as were in the most thorough sense
the channels in which his thoughts ran, he would not for less than a
fortune have risked encountering her scorn. For he believed, and therein
he was right, that she was capable of scorn, and that of no ordinarily
withering quality: Hester had not yet gathered the sweet gentleness that
comes of long breathing the air of the high countries. It is generally
many years before a strong character learns to think of itself as it
ought to think. While there is left in us the possibility of scorn we
know not quite the spirit we are of--still less if we imagine we may
keep this or that little shadow of a fault. But Hester was far less
ready to scorn on her own account than on the part of another. And if
she had fairly seen into the mind interesting her so much, seen how
poverty-stricken it was, and with how little motion towards the better,
she would indeed have felt a great rush of scorn, but chiefly against
herself for being taken in after such a fool's-fashion.
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