Agreed. If I was the editor, I would have hacked this pompous paragraph into a concise form; the author would have hated it but I would tell him I was saving the reader from his PTSD inducing writing.

e.g., “Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit. It was my folly. Your youth and beauty! Misshapen from birth, how could I delude myself with the idea that my intellectual gifts might veil my physical deformity! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people in this land. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our story!”