Neville describes receiving a tape recording, brought to him by a friend, from a woman in Maine whom he had met eight years earlier at a lecture in San Francisco. On the tape she recounted how she and a friend -- traveling with the friend's two young daughters and a large poodle named Doris -- had been reduced to eight dollars when they stopped by Neville's home on El Camino in Beverly Hills. Having firmly believed his teaching that imagining creates reality, they set off that same night; in Palm Springs, though they were fine-art painters rather than house painters, they took a house-painting job, did it well, and used it to recoup their finances.