The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter 10 Page 5

rendered him suspicious of all mankind. Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared. He therefore still kept up a familiar intercourse with him, daily receiving the old physician in his study, or visiting the laboratory, and, for recreation’s sake, watching the processes by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency.

One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill of the open window, that looked towards the grave-yard, he talked with Roger Chillingworth, while the old man was examining a bundle of unsightly plants.

“Where,” asked he, with a look askance at them — for it was the clergyman’s peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked straight forth at any object, whether human or inanimate,