Louise telephoned Neville from New York at three in the afternoon to tell him that her husband Joseph, aged 77, had died of a ruptured aorta in her arms and in the arms of their son Neville, Neville Goddard's namesake.

Twenty-odd years ago a poor young model asked him whether she should spend her small savings on one week in Paris; he told her he was not a rational adviser and to go, and on the second day there she met the wealthy man she married.

Neville recounts being in Louise's Huntington Palisades home, where she had imagined herself conducting a dinner party in its dining room with Neville at her right and his wife at her husband's right, before the house was offered to her; she beat the price down from $117,500 to $75,000, and Neville was present when the $7,500 deposit was put down.

Neville describes Louise, who started with nothing in Los Angeles and is now a multimillionaire, keeping his book The Law and the Promise at her bedside and doing nightly 'homework' - imagining objectives for her husband, children and herself until they are objectively real, then sleeping.

A week ago a friend in the audience asked Neville for a couple of New York introductions; Neville gave him two names, one of them Louise's, and the friend was invited to dinner at her thirty-third floor apartment, where she said she had been imagining delivering the painting to California uncrated, and he volunteered to carry it - bringing it to tonight's meeting.

He has not seen Neville Mark for four years; the last time, the boy came down and spent three weeks with them in Barbados, long-haired and unusually pretty, and now at eighteen he is six feet tall, does all the cooking, washing, ironing and sewing, makes dresses and is studying design to inherit his father's fashion business.

Neville tells of a couple from his New York meetings, Joseph and Louise: she went to Paris on a cheap round-trip ticket after asking his advice, met a wealthy man five times divorced on a blind date, married and had two boys, Larry and one named Neville after him; Larry was killed in a car accident in London two weeks ago last Saturday.

When IBM bought the 57th Street building and terminated her husband's lease, Louise made him name twelve things he wanted instead of reasons why he could not have them, and she imagined every one into being - the eight-story building at 41 West 57th Street, someone to take over their $1,250 apartment lease, and a 30th-floor apartment next door at $650.

After Larry's ashes were brought back and scattered in Central Park, Louise went into two months of shock and her husband telephoned and wrote to Neville long distance asking whether he should put her in an asylum.

Louise told him that two months after Larry's death, in the early hours in her bedroom on the 33rd floor on Central Park South, Larry came out of her own being and sat on the arm of a chair; she put herself beside him and brought Neville Mark in, communicated with Larry without words, and was instantly and permanently cured of her grief - afterwards seeing her husband and everyone in the street as talking shadows for twenty-four hours.

At three o'clock that afternoon Neville took a phone call from New York: Louise telling him her husband Joseph, aged 77, had died of a ruptured aorta in her arms and in the arms of their son Neville, his namesake; he could not get her off the wire and told her stories about the departed, reflecting that Joseph the couturier will wake at twenty, unchanged and uninterested in the birth from above.