The young man understood, now, that, instead of fulfilling the
purpose of his mother's sacrifice, and realizing for her her dying wish,
as he had promised; the course he had entered upon would have thwarted the
one and denied the other.
The young man had answered the novelist truly, that it was a case of the
blind beggar by the wayside. He might have carried the figure farther; for
that same blind beggar, when his eyes had been opened, was persecuted by
the very ones who had fed him in his infirmity. It is easier, sometimes,
to receive blindly, than to give with eyes that see too clearly.
When Mrs. Taine went to the artist, in the studio, the next day, she found
him in the act of re-tying the package of his mother's letters. For nearly
an hour, he had been reading them. For nearly an hour before that, he had
been seated, motionless, before the picture that Conrad Lagrange had said
was a portrait of the Spirit of Nature.
When Mrs. Taine had slipped off her wrap, and stood before him gowned in
the dress that so revealed the fleshly charms it pretended to hide, she
indicated the letters in the artist's hands, with an insinuating laugh;
while there was a glint of more than passing curiosity in her eyes.
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