The child could not be made amenable to rules.

Nathaniel Hawthorne.  My daughter is reading The Scarlet Letter. 
Before dinner I made the comment that I recalled Hawthorne's
writing as being "ponderous."  After dinner, she sought help in
understanding a few paragraphs.  I now remember why, 161 years
later, we still read him and why we call this sort of work "classic."

The following is just a random passage from the puzzling section:

      This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly express, the various properties of her inner life.  Her nature appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but - or else Hester's fears deceived her - it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which she was born.  The child could not be made amenable to rules.  In giving her existence, a great law had been broken, and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.  Hester could only account for the child's character - and even then most vaguely and imperfectly - by recalling what she herself had been, during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its material of earth.  The mother's impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and however white and clear originally, they had take the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the untempered light of the intervening substance.  Above all, the warfare of Hester's spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl.  She could recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency that had brooded in her heart.

I'm speechless.