Scarlet Letter D.J. # 28 - Chapter 14: Part 2.

"Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play with the shells and tangled seaweed, until she should have talked awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a bird, and, making bare her small white feet, went pattering along the moist margin of the sea. Here and there, she came to a full stop, and peeped curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image of a little maid, whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited to take her hand and run a race with her. But the visionary little maid, on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say,—“This is a better place! Come thou into the pool!” And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while, out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water." (pg. 147 1st paragraph) In the same paragraph as Pearl being a bird, she is again part of nature. She's compared to an elf with dark shiny curls. She's outside the town's rules, and can dance, run, and play unlike any child in the society. She does not have any friends so she has no one to play with, so instead she pretends to have a friend (imaginary friend / her reflection) in the water. Her mother, regardless of what people may think of her now are still obays laws.