The painter was driven to his course by that self-respect, without which, no man can sanely endure his own company; together with that reverence—­I say it deliberately—­that reverence for his art, without which, no worthy work is possible.  He had come to understand that one may not prostitute his genius to the immoral purposes of a diseased age, without reaping a prostitute’s reward.  The hideous ruin that Mr. Taine had, in himself, wrought by the criminal dissipation of his manhood’s strength, and by the debasing of his physical appetites and passions, was to Aaron King, now, a token of the intellectual, spiritual, and moral ruin that alone can result from a debased and depraved dissipation of an artist’s creative power.  He saw clearly, now, that the influence his work must wield upon the lives of those who came within its reach, must be identical with the influence of Sibyl Andres, who had so unconsciously opened his eyes to the true mission and glory of the arts, and thus had made his decision possible.  In that hour when Mrs. Taine had revealed herself to him so clearly, following as it did so closely his days of work and the final completion of his portrait of the girl among the roses, he saw and felt the woman, not as one who could help him to the poor rewards of a temporary popularity, but as the spirit of an age that threatens the very life of art by seeking to destroy the vital truth and purpose of its existence.  He felt that in painting the portrait of Mrs. Taine—­as he had painted it—­he had betrayed a trust; as truly as had his father who, for purely personal aggrandizement, had stolen the material wealth intrusted to him by his fellows.  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.  “Dear me,” she said, “I hope I am not intruding upon the claims of some absent affinity.”