A friend told Neville, the Friday night before this lecture, how years earlier he had come to see his own mother as merely an image of the material world. He then described a vivid mystical experience: finding himself as a young man in seaside rooms, writing a letter to his mother, he was interrupted by a woman entering the room and, in the exchange that followed, was startled to remember that his mother had actually died -- long ago by her account, though by ordinary time only a few months earlier -- and that an undertaker, not his mother, had quietly been paying for his rooms so he would not have to face the truth before he was ready. Neville reads the vision as a sign his friend stands on the verge of a complete spiritual awakening.