~One of my favorite books~

An excerpt from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
It may seem marvellous, that with the world before her, free to return to her birthplace, or to any other land, and there hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as if emerging into another state of being - and having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned her - it may seem marvellous that this woman should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame.
But there is a fatality, so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge which saddens it.
Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to ever other wandereer, into her wild and dreary, life-long home.
All other scenes of earth were foreign to her in comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken.
It might be, too - doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpant from its hole - it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal.
There dwelt, there trode the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in a union, that unrecognized on earth, would bring them together for a joint futurity of endless retribution.
Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like, becasue the result of martyrdom.
She, therefore, did not flee.