Free Rest and Be Thankful by Helen MacInnes

Jones. She had her third cold shower, changed her clothes again, and put on her hat and lipstick most carefully for Twenty-one. Just as she was almost ready to leave Prender ’phoned to say that they might have dinner instead in a little French restaurant around the corner: it was so much easier to talk there. Poor Prender, his intentions for dinner were always good, but they invariably flinched two hours before the bill was presented. Now, if she hadn’t answered that telephone call! But she stopped feeling amused as she entered the hot street, and felt the warm waves of air surge up from the sidewalk. The little French restaurant “just around the corner” was too near to justify a taxi, too far for pleasant walking in this weather. It would probably be having difficulties with its air-conditioning.
    It was, for it relied on a fan. Prender’s face, she was glad to see, was already having its difficulties too. This would be a dripping, oozing, brow-mopping evening.
    “How well you look!” he said truthfully, and then he added a trifle too truthfully, “Years younger! What have you been doing to your hair? Most attractive that way.” He guided her to the tight little seat behind a small table with a checked cloth. “Isn’t this very Left Bank? Reminds me of the days when I used to visit you in Paris.” His voice became suddenly practical. “And what’s this new adventure you have engineered? We are all dying of curiosity. My ’phone has been ringing for the last three days.”
    There was no need to answer his question, for Margaret Peel’s telegram to Prender had been remarkably explanatory. So Sarah smiled and said, “Thank you for sending me the list of writers who might be interested in coming to Wyoming. I’ve spent today telephoning the names you marked specially.”
    “I made that list as soon as I got the telegram,” he assured her. “I know how desperately urgent it was for you.”
    Sarah felt her eyes widen. Somehow she had thought the predicament of the unhoused writers would have been a desperately urgent problem for Prender. He might even have said thank you to Margaret Peel. But at this moment, as he ordered red caviar and madrilène, to be followed by sole amandine (flounder with nuts on), it was obvious that he was Margaret’s benefactor. He finished his assault on the French language with a little domestic wine suitable for a lady, and then remembered that Sarah Bly had an excellent palate. He covered his confusion by firing off questions, amusingly phrased, in his crisp way. He had great charm, and used it as expertly as he managed his excellent hands. They pulled information out of you, Sarah thought: she was amazed at her own power of describing Rest and be Thankful.
    “It sounds delightful,” he said. “I think we shall have a most enjoyable holiday. What other lecturers have you decided to ask? I’ll give ‘The Subconscious in the Novel.’ Or perhaps ‘The Approach to Kafka’?”
    Sarah’s smile faded. “We hadn’t planned any lectures.”
    He was incredulously amused. “But you must have lecturers, Sarah!”
    “Frankly, we cannot afford their fees. This is an expensive undertaking—much more so than we had imagined, I’m afraid. Wages and prices in America are so much higher than in Europe, you know.”
    Ridiculous nonsense, he thought. Margaret Peel could easily have afforded to finance his Literary Festival; and she could certainly now offer her Rest and be Thankful to him for the summer. Instead she had financed her own idea and stolen his writers. He was deeply wounded. He passed his hand over his thick white hair, lightly enough not to disarrange its carefully encouraged wave. This was a sign of distress. His light grey eyes, rather too closely set together in an otherwise handsome face, looked at Sarah reproachfully. “My own summer was all built around the writers,” he said.
    Sarah tried to murmur something about accommodation being limited, but he waved that