Sentence No. 150 · 24 August 2026
In all those years it had never once been opened; but either she unlocked it, or the decaying wood and iron yielded to her hand, or she glided shadow-like through these impediments,—and, at all events, went in.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne — The Scarlet Letter (1850) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
Notice the triple structure introduced by 'either' — three alternative explanations stacked in parallel, each opening with 'or'. Whenever you see 'either' begin a clause, expect matching 'or' branches to follow in the same grammatical shape.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 8 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. A weary woman returns to the place of her old suffering. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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