e bad taste to marry Selah Tarrant would
not have been likely under any circumstances to possess a very straight
judgement; but there is no doubt that this poor lady had grown
dreadfully limp. She had blinked and compromised and shuffled; she asked
herself whether, after all, it was any more than natural that she should
have wanted to help her husband, in those exciting days of his
mediumship, when the table, sometimes, wouldn't rise from the ground,
the sofa wouldn't float through the air, and the soft hand of a lost
loved one was not so alert as it might have been to visit the circle.
Mrs. Tarrant's hand was soft enough for the most supernatural effect,
and she consoled her conscience on such occasions by reflecting
that she ministered to a belief in immortality. She was glad,
somehow, for Verena's sake, that they had emerged from the phase of
spirit-intercourse; her ambition for her daughter took another form than
desiring that she, too, should minister to a belief in immortality. Yet
among Mrs. Tarrant's multifarious memories these reminiscences of the
darkened room, the waiting circle, the little taps on table and wall,
the little touches on cheek and foot, the music in the air, the rain of
flowers, the sense of something mysteriously flitting, were most
tenderly cherished. She hated her husband for having magnetised her so
that she consented to certain things, and even did them, the thought of
which to-day would suddenly make her face burn; hated him for the manner
in which, somehow, as she felt, he had lowered her social tone; yet at
the same time she admired him for an impudence so consummate that it had
ended (in the face of mortifications, exposures, failures, all the
misery of a hand-to-mouth existence) by imposing itself on her as a kind
of infallibility. She knew he was an awful humbug, and yet her knowledge
had this imperfection, that he had never confessed it--a fact that was
really grand when one thought of his opportunities for doing so. He had
never allowed that he wasn't straight; the pair had so often been in the
position of the two augurs behind the altar, and yet he had never given
her a glance that the whole circle mightn't have observed. Even in the
privacy of domestic intercourse he had phrases, excuses, explanations,
ways of putting things, which, as she felt, were too sublime for just
herself; they were pitched, as Selah's nature was pitched, altogether in
the key of public life.

So it had co