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.