The second chapter presents a picture of Hepzibah at dawn on the day that she must perform the dreaded task of opening a shop, of becoming a "tradesperson." Dawn, the traditional symbol of new beginnings, holds no positive meaning for this old woman who has shut herself up in her house, completely apart from "the business of life." The very crossing of the threshold of her own bedroom door is a crucial moment, a daring act. Shut away from the world and the sun, her black mood and her scowl have come to define her. And even though her heart never "frowns," even though it is tender and sensitive, it is full of little tremors and palpitations that are called weaknesses. Her scowl and her sternness, significantly, also belonged to the Colonel, the original Pyncheon, as they now belong to the Judge, the present leading Pyncheon, although the Judge takes care to conceal these ominous indications of his true nature. As Hepzibah comes into her shop to arrange her "wares" for the first time, there is a deeply tragic sense that contrasts greatly with the "ludicrous pettiness of her employment."
The novel's narrative actually begins in Chapter 3, "The First Customer," when Hepzibah has to face the sunlight of everyday reality. Darkness, we see, is the emblematic "color" of the Pyncheons, and — contrasted with its opposite, light — it forms one of the major symbols of the novel: the opposition of dark and light. The two images are opposed as shadow and sunshine, as frown and smile, and as Pyncheon portrait and sunlit daguerreotype.
At the first ring of the shop bell, Hepzibah rises, as pale as a ghost; however, it is not a customer but her lodger, Holgrave. Entering from the morning light, "he appears to bring" some of its cheery influence into the shop along with him. Appears is a very important word here, for Holgrave is a Maule and not a true inhabitant of "the street." Early in the first chapter, the narrator cites the prediction that old Matthew Maule's ghost will haunt the "new apartments" of the Pyncheon house. This prophesy has come true in flesh and blood in the person of Holgrave, who lives in a remote gable of the house, separated from the main portion. Although his real home has been the street, and although his education has been the result of "passing through the thoroughfares of life," he has now cut himself off from the street. However, he really belongs to neither realm — neither to the realm of the house nor to the realm of the street. He is, we must remember, a descendant of Matthew Maule. Therefore, Holgrave does belong, as it were, more to the house than to the street. He, like the inhabitants of the house, has a "dark, high-featured countenance," and a strange gleam of half-hidden sarcasm can be observed behind the kindliness of his manner. As a daguerreotypist, he remarks that he "misuses Heaven's sunshine" by tracing out human features through its "agency."
