Old rags, he says (sotto voce.—Yes, all right, Feda will go back), cloth decaying and going rotten. Different kinds of cloth give off different smells—rotting linen smells different to rotting wool. You can understand how all this interests me. Apparently, as far as I can gather, the rotting wool appears to be used for making things like tweeds on our side. But I know I am jumping, I'm guessing at it. My suit I expect was made from decayed worsted on your side.[25]
Some people here won't take this in even yet—about the material cause of all these things. They go talking about spiritual robes made of light, built by the thoughts on the earth plane. I don't believe it. They go about thinking that it is a thought robe that they're wearing, resulting from the spiritual life they led; and when we try to tell them that it is manufactured out of materials, they don't believe it. They say, "No, no, it's a robe of light and brightness which I manufactured by thought." So we just leave it. But I don't say that they won't get robes quicker when they have led spiritual lives down there; I think they do, and that's what makes them think that they made the robes by their lives.
You know flowers, how they decay. We have got flowers here; your decayed flowers flower again with us—beautiful flowers. Lily has helped me a lot with flowers.
O. J. L.—Do you like her?
Yes, but he didn't expect to see her.
(Feda, sotto voce.—No. Raymond, you don't mean that.)
Yes, he does. He says he's afraid he wasn't very polite to her when he met her at first; he didn't expect a grown-up sister there. Am I a little brother, he said, or is she my little sister? She calls me her little brother, but I have a decided impression that she should be my little sister.
He feels a bit of a mystery: he has got a brother there he knows, but he says two.
(Sotto voce.—No, Yaymond, you can't have two. No, Feda doesn't understand.) Is it possible, he says, that he has got another brother—one that didn't live at all?
O. J. L.—Yes, it is possible.