Browning's refusal to admit that disagreement was possible. She never
believed in her husband's disbelief; and he had been not unreasonably
annoyed by her always assuming it to be feigned. But his doubt of
spiritualistic sincerity was not feigned. She cannot have thought,
and scarcely can have meant to say so. She may have meant to say, 'You
believe that these are tricks, but you know that there is something real
behind them;' and so far, if no farther, she may have been in the
right. Mr. Browning never denied the abstract possibility of spiritual
communication with either living or dead; he only denied that such
communication had ever been proved, or that any useful end could
be subserved by it. The tremendous potentialities of hypnotism and
thought-reading, now passing into the region of science, were not then
so remote but that an imagination like his must have foreshadowed them.
The natural basis of the seemingly supernatural had not yet entered into
discussion. He may, from the first, have suspected the existence of some
mysterious force, dangerous because not understood, and for this reason
doubly liable to fall into dangerous hands. And if this was so, he
would necessarily regard the whole system of manifestations with
an apprehensive hostility, which was not entire negation, but which
rebelled against any effort on the part of others, above all of those
he loved, to interpret it into assent. The pain and anger which could be
aroused in him by an indication on the part of a valued friend of even
an impartial interest in the subject points especially to the latter
conclusion.

He often gave an instance of the tricks played in the name of
spiritualism on credulous persons, which may amuse those who have not
yet heard it. I give the story as it survives in the fresher memory of
Mr. Val Prinsep, who also received it from Mr. Browning.