The Scarlet Letter: The Plot

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admits this while talking to her in the jail cell.
"Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false
and unnatural relation with my decay."
His second sin is allowing himself to become obsessed with
vengeance against Dimmesdale].
"But, as he proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce,
though still calm, necessity seized the old man within its gripe, and never
set him free again until he had done all its bidding. He now dug into the
poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a
sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been
buried on the dead man's bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality
and corruption. Alas, for his own soul, if these were what he sought!
Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning
blue and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like
one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful ...

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