The experience Neville says he had to have in order to see that it was his own intense belief in the symbols that made them work. He had taught a friend, Norma Carpenter, to set up and read charts - a retired schoolteacher living in a hotel, eking out a small railroad pension of her husband's and a small pension from her former job in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with a little augmented income from readings. He came to her rooms one day and found her in tears. A man recommended by a friend had telephoned, eager to see her about a deal, and had given her his birth data over the phone, so she erected the chart before he arrived. She was so convinced of the good fortune falling his way that day that she told him she could close the book on it, and he offered a hundred dollars if she was telling the truth. She asked for it at once, since it had to work that day; he refused to pay in advance. Then she discovered what she was weeping about: she had made the chart from a bound volume of Ephemerides while sitting at an open window in the heat, had turned away, and the wind had blown the pages over - so she had erected and progressed the chart of a man born ten years before her client was born. Neville asked her only one question: did you believe it when you spoke to him? She said certainly. Forget it, he told her; it's done. That night, about eight, a Western Union boy came upstairs with a check for a hundred dollars. The moral he takes is not about astrology's falsity but about where its power came from - and the sequel is bleaker: Norma still cannot sell the belief, because they all believed in me, and so she cannot buy the pearl of great price. A child of the pearl motif; that one states the price, this one shows someone who could not pay it.