She accepts the duties of life as an equivalent for its happiness, i.e.,
for the happiness of love. She has been drawing from the cast of a
hand--enraptured with its delicate beauty--thinking how the rapture must
have risen into love in the artist who saw it living; when the coarse
(laborious) hand of a little peasant girl reminds her that life, whether
beautiful or not, is the artist's noblest study; and that, as the uses
of a hand are independent of its beauty and will survive it, life with
its obligations will survive love. "She has been a fool to think she
must be loved or die."