"Many people seem to think that the power to see auras must be very useful in helping one to distinguish between friends and foes, but such is not really the case. Auras exemplify individual character, not individual predilections, and some of my friends being very bad characters, indeed, have shocking auras. I had one great friend who, at the beginning of our acquaintance, spent much of his time in prison, which was really a blessing for his ill-used wife. His aura was literally in tatters, just a little irregular circle of rags and patches. I had just succeeded in making him sober, by insisting constantly and most seriously that he was "a cut above the public-house," and much too superior a man to mix with such degraded companions, when the war broke out. He went to the front, and on his first return to Blighty, badly gassed, he came at once to see me. I really felt a sort of personal pride in him, and an actual sense of personal possession in his enormously grown aura... Here, indeed, was an infant soul that had begun to develop on the right road, and the tattered aura of rags and patches had become a neatly trimmed little halo round his poor tired head."