In London in 1925, when Neville was twenty, a young man six months his junior named Matthew — whose retired opera-singer father had given Neville The Light of Asia and other books — refused all interest in these things because he had to live first; four months after Neville returned to America he heard the boy had gone to India as a tea taster, caught a tropical disease and died at twenty-one, while the 'old' parents lived into their eighties.