r, may, in spite of the condemnation
of the pretending rulers, live in the life of his race, long after the
names to which he refused to bow are lost in the dust of their self-raised
thrones.

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 clearl