"Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Egotism or The Bosom Serpent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

ladies, rivals in fashionable life, who tormented one another with a
thousand little stings of womanish spite, were given to understand,
that each of their hearts was a nest of diminutive snakes, which did
quite as much mischief as one great one.

But nothing seemed to please Roderick better than to lay hold of
a person infected with jealousy, which he represented as an enormous
green reptile, with an ice-cold length of body, and the sharpest sting
of any snake save one.

"And what one is that?" asked a bystander, overhearing him.

It was a dark-browed man, who put the question; he had an evasive
eye, which, in the course of a dozen years, had looked no mortal
directly in the face. There was an ambiguity about this person's
character- a stain upon his reputation- yet none could tell
precisely of what nature; although the city-gossips, male and
female, whispered the most atrocious surmises. Until a recent period
he had followed the sea, and was, in fact, the very ship-master whom
George Herkimer had encountered, under such singular circumstances, in
the Grecian Archipelago.

"What bosom-serpent has the sharpest sting?" repeated this man: but
he put the question as if by a reluctant necessity, and grew pale
while he was uttering it.

"Why need you ask?" replied Roderick, with a look of dark
intelligence. "Look into your own breast! Hark, my serpent bestirs
himself! He acknowledges the presence of a master-fiend!"

And then, as the bystanders afterwards affirmed, a hissing sound
was heard, apparently in Roderick Elliston's breast. It was said, too,
that an answering hiss came from the vitals of the shipmaster, as if a
snake were actually lurking there, and had been aroused by the call of
its brother-reptile. If there were in fact any such sound, it might
have been caused by a malicious exercise of ventriloquism, on the part
of Roderick.

Thus, making his own actual serpent- if a serpent there actually
was in his bosom- the type of each man's fatal error, or hoarded
sin, or unquiet conscience, and striking his sting so unremorsefully
into the sorest spot, we may well imagine that Roderick became the
pest of the city. Nobody could elude him; none could withstand him. He
grappled with the ugliest truth that he could lay his hand on, and
compelled his adversary to do the same. Strange spectacle in human
life, where it is the instinctive effort of one and all to hide
those sad realities, and leave them undisturbed beneath a heap of
superficial topics, which constitute the materials of intercourse
between man and man! It was not to be tolerated that Roderick Elliston
should break through the tacit compact, by which the world has done