Neville's confession of the one thing he kept back, told as the exact failure the pearl parable is about. Before he found Christ he had foretold events for unnumbered people in New York through the medium of the cards and the medium of the stars - he says he had almost the entire Metropolitan Opera crowd coming to him - and he predicted with conviction because he so believed in what he did, and it worked. Not knowing then that it was his own imagination that predicted accurately, he held back a little reserve note in his mind's eye when he found Christ: he still carried his old horoscope in his mental furniture and could quickly arrange its progression. What that reserve bought him was an alibi. The ruler of my second house in conflict with the ruler of my sixth - so I can't get the job, there's no money in it - and failure is justified before it happens. He had to destroy it as a power that guided him, and the destruction was necessarily imaginal: tear up my horoscope in my mind's eye, it doesn't exist. He sets Blake's line beside it - self-justification is the voice of hell - and locates hell here: in hell everyone is justifying himself, and when Venus passes he still has Mercury, and when something happens in spite of both he goes back and finds the reason that was there all along. A child of the pearl motif; that one states the price, this one is the author's own account of paying it late.