Earlier that afternoon, before the lecture, Neville privately imagined holding a red rose, vividly feeling its soft, velvety texture in his mind even though his lapel was bare, as a quiet experiment in testing his own creative imagination. That same evening, a woman in the audience -- unaware of his experiment -- brought him a real red rose cut from her own garden and asked if he would wear it. Neville presents the coincidence as proof that what he had held only in imagination that afternoon had become visible reality by nightfall.