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Rh work and philosophy of his lifetime. He attempted to pooh-pooh it, to laugh at it, to ignore it with con¬ tempt, but the confounded thing would insist upon obtruding itself once more. On Monday he would write it finally off his books, and before Saturday he would be up to his neck in it again. And the thing was so absurd ! It seemed to him that his mind was being drawn from the great pressing material prob¬ lems of the Universe in order to waste itself upon Grimm’s fairy tales or the ghosts of a sensational novelist.

Then things grew worse. First Malone, who had in his simple fashion been an index figure representing the normal clear-headed human being, had in some way been bedevilled by these people and had com¬ mitted himself to their pernicious views. Then Enid, his ewe-lamb, his one real link with humanity, had also been corrupted. She had agreed with Malone’s conclusions. She had even hunted up a good deal of evidence of her own. In vain he had himself investi¬ gated a case and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the medium was a designing villain who brought messages from a widow’s dead husband in order to get the woman into his power. It was a clear case and Enid admitted it. But neither she nor Malone would allow any general application. “ There are rogues in every line of life,” they would say. “We must judge every movement by the best and not by the worst.”

All this was bad enough, but worse still was in store. He had been publicly humiliated by the Spiritualists — and that by a man who admitted that he had had no education and would in any other subject in the world have been seated like a child at the Professor’s feet.