写出最爱的英文书籍或文章的精彩片段《红字的第二章》

Question

写出最爱的英文书籍或文章的精彩片段
《红字的第二章》

Answer 1

It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our story begins its course,that the women,of whom there were several in the crowd,appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue.The age had not so much refinement,that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways,and wedging their not unsubstantial persons,if occasion were,into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution.Morally,as well as materially,there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants,separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for,throughout that chain of ancestry,every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom,a more delicate and briefer beauty,and a slighter physical frame,if not a character of less force and solidity than her own.The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex.They were her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of their native land,with a moral diet not a whit more refined,entered largely into their composition.The bright morning sun,therefore,shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts,and on round and ruddy cheeks,that had ripened in the far-off island,and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England.There was,moreover,a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons,as most of them seemed to be,that would startle us at the present day,whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone.
红字的第二章