Two novellas set in Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are both popular manias, and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion.

The shipwrecked naturalist who is the protagonist of "Morpho Eugenia" is rescued by a family whose clandestine passions come to seem as unscrutable as the behavior of insects.

In "The Conjugial Angel," a circle of fictional mediums finds itself haunted by the ghost of a very real historical personage.