In 1925, when Neville was twenty and living for four months in London, he urged his friend Matthew Bentley, who was his own age, to take an interest in the philosophical outlook his own father -- then fifty-eight, a retired mining engineer -- had come to embrace. Bentley refused, saying he wanted to make his fortune first. After Neville returned to New York, Bentley went to India in the service of a tea company; a few months later he contracted malaria there and died, having put off any spiritual interest until money came first.