Neville recalls that a lady prominent both politically and socially in the country -- the daughter-in-law of a man who had been governor of New York, then Vice President, then President -- began attending his lecture meetings shortly after he started lecturing on 2 February 1938. He tells her story as an example of someone drawn early to his teaching who later came to him personally for help using imagination to solve a practical problem.

Warden's conflicting datings of when he first read Neville: when Neville had only one published book (c.1939-41 if literal); 'back into the '50s'; and 'fifty years ago' — his engagement with the written work began early and long preceded understanding. [Retold 4 times across the interviews.] [Date evidence: Warden says Neville had only one published book at the time he first read him — if literal, c.1939-1941 (between At Your Command and the second book); contradicts his other datings.]

At the height of the Depression in 1939, a woman in Neville's audience at a Baptist church on West 48th Street tried his teaching for herself: at Stern's department store on 42nd Street, she tried on a hat she loved and walked around the store and out onto Sixth Avenue still wearing it, imagining it already hers. When she returned for her own hat, she learned a salesclerk had already sold it; rather than risk bad publicity, the section manager let her keep any hat in the department as Stern's compliment. Four weeks later, a woman named Ann, having heard the story, imagined herself owning a $17.50 hat she could not afford, refusing even to look at herself in it so as not to be disillusioned -- and ten days after that, a friend gave her the identical hat as an unexpected gift.

In 1939, sensing the war to come, Neville's brother Victor -- a Barbados businessman who was also a ship chandler -- used the brief interval before war broke out to stock up heavily on ships' stores under the international agreement letting him supply visiting vessels. He judged correctly that once war came, England could not build ships fast enough to replace those the Germans sank, and Barbados would go without the imported goods it depended on; two years later, with almost no passenger ships calling at the isolated island, Victor's foresight left him the one holding what the island could no longer easily import.

Neville tells of a woman (the same one whose story appears in The Law and The Promise) who, at fifty-six and in dire financial straits, condensed her need into a single mood of already having a lavish income before sleep. Word of her hardship reached a benefactor she barely knew, a man who had made a fortune during the war years; he anonymously sent her a $2,500 check, then a new car, and finally arranged through a law office for a permanent stipend for the rest of her life, asking only that she never acknowledge or discuss it.

During the Second World War, when pianos could not be bought, a woman Neville knows cleared the space in her New York apartment where a piano would stand and felt its presence there; someone moving to the coast then gave her a concert grand piano.