denied the good faith of all the persons concerned. Mrs. Browning as
absolutely believed it; and no compromise between them was attainable,
because, strangely enough, neither of them admitted as possible that
mediums or witnesses should deceive themselves. The personal aspect
which the question thus received brought it into closer and more painful
contact with their daily life. They might agree to differ as to the
abstract merits of spiritualism; but Mr. Browning could not resign
himself to his wife's trustful attitude towards some of the individuals
who at that moment represented it. He may have had no substantial fear
of her doing anything that could place her in their power, though a
vague dread of this seems to have haunted him; but he chafed against the
public association of her name with theirs. Both his love for and his
pride in her resented it.

He had subsided into a more judicial frame of mind when he wrote 'Sludge
the Medium', in which he says everything which can excuse the liar and,
what is still more remarkable, modify the lie. So far back as the autumn
of 1860 I heard him discuss the trickery which he believed himself to
have witnessed, as dispassionately as any other non-credulous person
might have done so. The experience must even before that have passed
out of the foreground of his conjugal life. He remained, nevertheless,
subject, for many years, to gusts of uncontrollable emotion which would
sweep over him whenever the question of 'spirits' or 'spiritualism' was
revived; and we can only understand this in connection with the peculiar
circumstances of the case. With all his faith in the future, with all
his constancy to the past, the memory of pain was stronger in him than
any other. A single discordant note in the harmony of that married love,
though merged in its actual existence, would send intolerable vibrations
through his remembrance of it. And the pain had not been, in this
instance, that of simple disagreement. It was complicated by Mrs.