'Nor for people like me either, whose blood is still circulating. God's Waiting Room they call it when no one's listening. When He wants me He can find me just as easy in Vermont. That's where I'll be.' Pepper incorporated such comments in her story to give it the needed spice.

Her lively prose and Fritz's vivid photographs depicted so enticingly the lifestyle 'among the sixties and the seventies,' as the magazine called it, that three days after the team left, Pepper could send Zorn another fax: 'Story so smashing they're allotting us eight pages.' And when John Taggart heard about the story and saw early proofs of it, he found it so accurate in showing what he was trying to do that he ordered a thousand reprints for each of his eighty-seven centers, which distributed them widely.

Some who received copies came to inspect the Palms, and when they did they invariably asked whether they might meet Mrs. Jessup, who was always gracious in assuring them that the center was even more pleasant than the article had shown.

Zorn, happy to see the positive reactions to his brainchild, sent Pepper a three-word fax: 'You done good.' But he felt no desire to host any more press crews at his Palms.

If the Duchess had not been such an inveterate snoop, the members of the tertulia might not have uncovered the Reverend Quade's secret. When the postmaster arrived with a package too large to be included in Mrs. Quade's locked postal box, he had to leave the bulky bundle leaning against the row of boxes on the floor. This was an invitation to the Duchess to inspect from whom and from where the parcel had arrived, and she saw, with some excitement, that it had been mailed by the New York publishers Doubleday and obviously contained a manuscript.

Senator Raborn was passing by when the Duchess made this tempting discovery, and he heard her tell others at the mailboxes: 'It looks like our Reverend Quade has written a book.' Her listeners, inspecting the package, were easily convinced that the Duchess's assumption was correct.

As the four tertulia members convened that night for dinner, Raborn told them: 'I think it's highly likely that our Mrs. Quade is about to have a book published.' When the others heard about the package, they suggested that a fifth chair be added to their table and sent editor Jimenez to intercept Helen as she entered the dining room and escort her to their table.

When seated she asked quietly: 'And to what do I owe this signal honor?' Senator Raborn explained how the Duchess had happened to see the telltale package: 'We are intensely curious as to what it might be that you're writing.' Quickly he added: 'Assuming, of course, that Mrs. Elmore's deduction was correct.'

'It was,' Mrs. Quade said with just a touch of asperity. She was irritated by the snooping but also pleased by the fact that these somewhat aloof men had discovered she was writing a book, an activity they had probably thought was restricted to their own sex.

'May we ask,' President Armitage said as he leaned toward her, 'what the subject matter is? Commentary on the New Testament as it applies to contemporary living, perhaps?'

Ignoring his somewhat condescending manner, she first attended to giving her dinner order, then looked up and smiled at the men: 'It's nearly ready for publication-I'm correcting galleys. It's entitled Likewise the Mistress, Too.'

'Now, what could that refer to?' Ambassador St. Pres asked. 'It's a phrase that reverberates, but I can't place it.' Turning to face her, he asked: 'It is a quotation, I believe?' and she nodded, launching into a description of the song from which the quotation was derived: 'One of the cherished songs of Christmas, dating way back to the time before the sentimental carols, was "The Wassail Song." Its words are simple, its music haunting, evoking memories of snowy yuletide scenes in seventeenth-century England. One can almost see a dozen men and boys stomping their feet to keep warm as their voices ring out in the chill night air.

'In the recording I have, which I bought in London one Christmas, a couple of lines captivated me. I'd been invited over to England to explain to church groups how I had become one of the first women in America to be ordained. It had shaken the British establishment and I'd been greeted with a mixture of cold courtesy and obvious distaste. After one testy interrogation I was walking back at dusk to my hotel when I heard from a music shop the opening chords of "The Wassail Song," and it seemed so Christmasy, so very right in its celebration of good fellowship, which under the circumstances I sorely needed, that I stood transfixed as two lines struck me as exactly defining my position.'

'I don't think any of us know the words. It's not a popular Christmas song here,' President Armitage said. She nodded, and brought up the phrase that had provided the title for her book.

'The song was sung by a professional chorus, with the men's voices vigorously singing "God bless the master of this house ..."

following which, almost as an afterthought, the boy sopranos-they'd allow no women in a chorus like that-sang in high sweet voices imitating women: "Likewise the mistress, too." '

She had half sung these words, and in the silence that followed, the men of the tertulia looked at one another and shrugged their shoulders, but Senator Raborn asked: 'The significance? What could the heavy significance of such casual words possibly be?'

When the others also admitted being baffled, she said quietly: 'The second line seemed a paradigm of my life-especially my life that difficult, wintry week in London.'

'Please explain,' President Armitage said softly, for he recognized in Mrs. Quade's delivery the voices of several women professors who had come to his office at the university with deep grievances against the academic tradition of male professors' blocking the promotion of their female counterparts, and he was not mistaken in guessing that Mrs. Quade was of that distinguished sisterhood.

'The words, and the offhand way in which they were delivered, as if this were a sop thrown to a lowly peasant-a generous afterthought-were directed specifically at me. The male voices sang of important things, the "female" voices were acknowledged but never taken seriously.'

'What did such an experience do to you?' the ambassador asked, and she replied carefully, for she was aware of the negative impact her words were going to have: 'The words confirmed what I've known for a long time. Made it brutally clear.'

'Now, what could that be?' Senator Raborn demanded, almost truculently. 'A simple Christmas carol. A simple phrase.'

'To you it would have sounded quite simple, I'm sure,' she said, 'but to me it reiterated what formal religion has always taught, that women have inferior stature-that they are, indeed, to be despised.'

Her words were bombshells, for not one of the four men was prepared to accept such a brazen condemnation of the churches that had sustained them and, leaving theology aside, to which they were in large part indebted for their success in life. Armitage and Jimenez had attended church-run universities. Senator Raborn had won his first election to his state's House of Representatives because a plurality of churchgoers had voted for him instead of his Democratic opponent, who had been accused of atheism, and the ambassador had served with ease and distinction in two Catholic countries. Each man wanted to challenge Mrs. Quade, but before anyone could do so, she strengthened her accusation by citing episodes from her extensive experience.

'I went to a Quaker school, one of the most liberal in the nation, but when we attended Sunday meeting in the little towns nearby, men were on the left as you entered the house of worship, women strictly on the right.'

'That sounds as if they were given seats of honor,' St. Pres suggested, but she corrected him: 'That was how you saw it when you entered, from the back, but when you sat on the facing bench from which the meeting was conducted, you saw the powerful men on the right, where they belonged, the weak women on the left, where they were ordained to sit.'

'That's a preposterous conclusion to reach from accidental seating,' Senator Raborn protested.

'Not so preposterous, for who sat on the facing bench, as if they were cardinals of the Catholic Church or deacons in the Baptist? Mostly men, as it has always been throughout the history of Quakerism. Who were the lay people who became known as Quaker ministers through the force of their speaking in meeting? George Fox, John Woolman, Rufus Jones.'

'Have you suffered because you were one of the first women-' began President Armitage, but Mrs. Quade ignored his question and cut him short. 'Primitive religions placed intolerable burdens on their women. In some societies a woman could be executed if she allowed her shadow to fall across the tribe's major fishing canoe. I could cite a hundred curious laws that disciplined women when they were menstruating. Men feared and hated women because of the arcane powers they had. They could bear babies. They sometimes saw things that men couldn't see, so such women were branded as witches and either burned or hanged.'

'You're speaking of primitives,' Jimenez argued, for he took her charges seriously and did not want them to stand as unchallenged truth, but his words led Mrs. Quade to the core of her argument: 'From the primitives, organized religions adopted the same strictures. When I taught in Pakistan I studied how Islam denigrates its women. They're not even allowed to pray alongside the men in the mosque. And how they're treated in nations like Arabia and the Emirates is a scandal.'

'But your Pakistan elected a woman as prime minister,' St. Pres pointed out, and she snapped: 'Yes, and didn't they get rid of her as soon as possible? And in the ugliest way, primarily because she was a woman.'

While the dishes were being cleared and dessert orders taken, Mrs. Quade progressed to her most contentious points: 'When I was stationed briefly in Israel, working with the rabbis, I attended a synagogue each Friday at sunset. No prayers could be said, nor the Torah read, unless ten men were present, a minyan. Women did not count. And those women who did attend the services-there weren't many-had to sit in an upper balcony behind a gauze drape to keep them from contaminating the worship below, and perhaps-who knows?-to keep from casting an evil spell on the Torah itself as it perched there in its sacred scroll'

'Ridiculous!' Jimenez cried. 'I've known scores of Jews. They revere their women,' to which Mrs. Quade said in a low voice: 'And what prayer, centuries old, does the Jewish man say as he admires himself in the bathroom mirror each morning? It ends: "And thank God I am not a woman." '

She was also harsh on the Mormons, saying that they kept their women in a secondary status, disciplining them severely if they stepped out of line, and when the men at the table protested because they knew Mormon men who treasured their womenfolk, she said: 'The public record is too clear. You don't have to accept it if you don't want to, but women of other faiths know it's accurate.'

She ran into vigorous opposition when she started to speak about the Bible itself and its constant placing of women in an inferior position, but she could point to Saint Paul and his almost savage disciplining of women as if they were troublesome children, and she quoted some of Paul's more famous remarks, such as 'It is good for a man not to marry,' and 'For man did not come from woman, but woman from man,' and 'Women should remain silent in church. They are not allowed to speak. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home.'

St Pres said: 'We all know that Saint Paul was a misogynist-he spoke only for himself,' but it was Jimenez who struck the decisive blow: 'I don't think you're quoting Saint Paul correctly. I remember the English words as being somewhat different,' and she had to confess: 'Like many modern clergy, I use the New International Version,' and each of the men said: 'Oh!' as if that removed her from serious consideration.

The arrival of dessert provided a recess from an argument that might have taken a tense or even ugly course, but when the plates were removed, St. Pres made a suggestion that all approved: 'Your attitudes are so concisely phrased, Reverend Quade, that we'd profit from hearing more. This is all rather new to us,' and Senator Raborn agreed: 'Yes, the voice of the New Woman.'

Unfortunately, editor Jimenez got the postprandial discussion off to the worst possible start by giving it as his judgment that 'at least the Catholic Church has always held women in the highest regard, certainly the equal of men and often their superiors.'

'I do not find that in the record of your Church,' Mrs. Quade said, trying not to sound contentious, but Jimenez bristled: 'I think if you look at the way my Church has glorified the Virgin Mary, giving her every honor mentioned in the Bible, you'll have to admit that we revere Mary, and have always honored her as the symbol of womanhood.'

Mrs. Quade at first seemed to accept this defense in silence, looking down at her fingers, clasped together as if to form a steeple. Then, looking up at the four men and not speaking exclusively to the editor, she ticked off a series of facts that she knew to be accurate through long study of original documents: 'The Bible says little about Mary's deification, nothing about her perpetual virginity except that Jesus had brothers, born Presumably after his birth, and nothing about her assumption into heaven.'

Editor Jimenez threw down his napkin: 'Those very attributes form the soul of what our Church teaches about Mary! Truth irrefutable.'

Very quietly Mrs. Quade said: 'None of those concepts appears in the Bible, nor in any other source until the Church Fathers promulgated the belief in A.D. 431 at one of their great councils-at Ephesus, I believe-and they did it, we think, to satisfy the growing complaints by women that they had no place in the Church. It was a bold move, and a thoroughly responsible one, a happy invention to save the Church.'

'I cannot believe that,' Jimenez protested, and the other men's agreement was voiced by St. Pres: 'From what I've witnessed in the Catholic countries, the Virgin Mary stands at the very heart of the Church. You could almost say that she defines it.'

Never raising her voice, because she knew she was on solid ground, Reverend Quade said: 'Today, yes, the Church has adopted Mary most effectively. But in the beginning three centuries she was not conspicuous, either in the Bible or in Church doctrine.'

'Then where did her glorification come from?' Jimenez demanded, and the clergywoman replied: 'From a handful of popular treatises, and would-be additions to the Bible, and from legend. Remember that when the Church Fathers finally decided to present her to the world with the attributes we revere today, the general public went wild with celebrations. It was one of the most widely accepted judgments ever handed down by the Church, that henceforth Mary was certified to have been a perpetual virgin, born and living with no knowledge of sin, and the special mediator between human beings and the Godhead. It started with that.'

Jimenez, outraged, rose from the table, bowed to the other members of the tertulia, ignored Mrs. Quade and stomped off with this parting shot: 'I do not wish to associate with heretics. Popular legend! It defames the word of God as given in the Holy Bible.'

When he was gone, Senator Raborn said: 'Well, you certainly stirred up a hornet's nest, Mrs. Quade.'

'It's only the truth.' She nodded to her hosts, then added a telling point: 'Everything I said was developed by Catholic scholars, the great men of the Church, centuries before Martin Luther was born. Catholics produced some of the finest theologians the world has had. They knew they needed Mary.'

For three days editor Jimenez was absent from the tertulia, but his chair was taken one night by Lewandowski, who spoke further about developments in the Human Genome Project. Specialists in various nations were identifying one gene after another which accounted for specific diseases and imperfections in human development: 'Last month it was discovered that an irregularity on chromosome seven seems to be a principal cause of cystic fibrosis. At the speed we're working in even the little laboratories we can expect miracles by the end of the century.' St. Pres spoke for all when he said: 'I'm not sure I want to see all your miracles, Lewandowski,' and the others laughed.

On the fourth evening editor Jimenez returned to the tertulia, pulled up a fifth chair, walked sedately to where Reverend Quade was sitting alone and said, as if he were a courtier addressing a queen: 'Would you grace us with your presence tonight?' With a slight bow she rose, took his arm and accompanied him to the corner table.

'I have invited Helen to join us,' he explained, 'because I owe her an apology,' and as the men wrote out their dinner orders, he continued: 'I've spent the last three days in libraries, checking on the veracity of what she said the other night about the history of the Virgin Mary in the life of the Catholic Church. I used Catholic studies mostly and can now assure you that almost all she told us that night is true. I apologize,' and he leaned across the table to kiss her hand.

'What exactly did you find?' President Armitage asked, and Jimenez replied: 'Most fascinating. The Church Fathers wanted desperately to find in the Bible some proof that would substantiate the idea that had become so popular with the general public, because of the legends and the colorful tracts. In the New Testament they could find nothing, not a word, just as Helen said. But a very clever scholar at the end of the fourth century, when Mary had been dead for more than three hundred years, found in the Old Testament a cryptic passage written by the priest of the Temple, Ezekiel, some six hundred years before the birth of Christ, which the scholar was convinced proved the perpetual virginity of Mary. He had to do some fancy rationalizing to reach his conclusions, because the passage itself is totally obscure.' Taking from his pocket a small piece of paper he began: 'I copied it, word for word, from the real Bible, and I shall read it to you now,' and he bowed to Mrs. Quade: 'It all depends upon the word gate: 'Then the man brought me back to the outer gate, and it was shut. The Lord said to me, "This gate is to remain shut, It must not be opened; no one may enter through it. It is to remain shut because the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered through it." '

When none of the men could figure out what this crucial text was saying, Jimenez continued: 'With full apologies to Reverend Quade for the word I must use, the church fathers explained that the word gate meant the vagina of the Virgin through which Jesus would enter the world, and through which no other mortal would ever pass.' Raising his hands in a kind of triumph as if he himself had solved this puzzle, he said: 'In the passage written about 600 B.C. Jesus is not identified, nor the Virgin Mary and certainly not her private parts, but nine hundred years later the Church was so eager to find proof of her perpetual virginity that they accepted this strange interpretation of a text almost a thousand years old.'

Folding his paper with its quotation from Ezekiel Chapter 44, verses one through three, he concluded: 'It seems that drastic measures, tortured interpretations, were required, but in the end a great good was accomplished, delivering a noble portrait of a noble woman to the peasants of the time, men and women like us, who desperately wanted to believe.' Again he nodded toward Reverend Quade: 'And it was Helen's obstinacy that brought the truth to us.'

From that moment on, the tertulia referred to the brilliant woman who often ate with them as Helen. She had established her own credentials.

The widow Clay had finally decided to have a lumpectomy as planned, and when the chemotherapy caused her hair to fall out, she also inherited Mrs. Mallory's expensive French wig, but when it came time to sort out the various medical bills she found that her troubles were just beginning. The problem was that her various doctors and experts each seemed to have his or her unique pattern of submitting bills, so that she could never determine whether she should pay the doctor immediately or wait till some governmental agency or private insurance company would reimburse him or her for part of the bill, whereupon Mrs. Clay would be responsible for the remainder.

Of course she had Medicare plus minimal additional coverage from her dead husband's company, but each of these organizations operated in such mysterious ways that she never knew who owed what or who was to pay for each procedure. So she was harassed by eight different agencies: five doctors, the hospital, Medicare, and private insurance in a jungle so tangled and uncharted that in total frustration she sought guidance from Dr. Zorn. He found he could answer almost none of her questions and became so fascinated by this aspect of American health services in day-to-day operations that he started to 'bird-dog each of the steps.' Knowing that he was not well enough informed to unravel the paper trail he suggested to Mrs. Clay that she consult with Miss Foxworth, who had made herself the Palms expert in the workings of health-care bureaucracy. The widow thanked him: 'I graduated from a good college, but on this I'm totally lost,' and before she left Zorn's office she showed him a threatening letter she had received that morning. It dealt with a visit to a local doctor's office, warning her that if she did not pay the balance of her overdue account her case would be put in the hands of a local bill collection agency with possible damage to her credit rating: 'Patrons have found that if delinquency is once reported, it is a difficult matter to get it removed. Please protect your good reputation. Pay this arrears now, and no action will be taken. You have two weeks to comply.'

She explained to Zorn that her deceased husband, a meticulous businessman, had always paid every bill presented to him by the doctor in question and had been assured that the doctor's office would handle the rest of the paperwork: 'I've done the same, and now I get this threat. What can I do, my credit rating is important, because if a widow loses it she has a difficult time getting it restored.'

'That's what Miss Foxworth is skilled at. May I listen in on what happens? In my job I ought to know.'

The conference was held in the accountant's crowded office, where she kept a vast number of important addresses and phone numbers to help her unravel the mysteries of American health care: 'First let me get the facts straight. You were treated by five doctors?'

'Yes. There are so many involved in treating a cancer patient. And I paid each one the part of his fee that he wanted. His office staff promised me they'd take care of the rest of the paperwork.'

'You have your canceled checks proving payment?'

'I don't know. I have their bills, which I marked "Paid in full" and the date.'

'Could you get the canceled checks?'

'I suppose so. Yes.'

'But some of the doctors have sent additional bills, the unpaid balances, asking you to pay up?'

'Yes. But they promised me Medicare would pay that. Or my husband's company insurance, Home Health of Minneapolis.'

'And you paid your hospital bills?'

'Yes. This long sheet of paper is the bill.'

'How many days in the hospital?'

'Only seven. I recuperated fast.'

'So the total hospital bill, before any payments, was this figure? $18,950? Has the hospital threatened you?'

'They demand that I pay, but they haven't made any threats.'

'Have you spoken with anyone in the Florida Medicare office?'

'Several people, but I don't recall their names, since each time I called I spoke with someone different.'

'Let's see if we can get anywhere by starting with Florida Medicare.' Miss Foxworth dialed the 800 number and after listening to about ten minutes of music, she finally got a clerk on the line. 'Good morning. I'm calling on behalf of Clara Clay.'

'Who are you? Are you authorized to speak for her?'

'I'm the accountant for a Tampa retirement center, and Mrs. Clay is right beside me.'

'Well, ma'am, my computer says that's impossible. According to our records, Clara Clay died several months ago-October 15.'

'What! She's very much alive, sitting right beside me as we talk.'

'If you'll hold a moment, I'll get my supervisor.' And Nora had to listen to another five minutes of cloying music until the supervisor picked up the line.

'Yes, this is Mrs. Kennedy. Are you calling about Clarice Carpenter Clay of Coral Gables?'

'No. Mrs. Clara Cunningham Clay of Tampa.'

'Just a minute, let me check the name on the computer. Well, I'll be ... When names are so nearly identical, errors do slip in. Glad to hear this Mrs. Clay is still with us. She's right there? Please put her on the line. Welcome to the land of the living, Mrs. Clay. Was your husband Dortmund Clay of Chicago?'

'No, Detwiler Clay of Indianapolis.'

'And your Social Security number?' When it matched the one in the computer, Mrs. Kennedy said brightly: 'A deplorable mistake, but understandable. The computer here mixed up the files of the two Mrs. Clays. It will take us some time to sort out what bills and information belong in which file, but when we do there'll be no further embarrassment to you.'

Getting Clara restored to life and her file in order required all morning, but in the space between telephone calls Miss Foxworth had an opportunity to check the various bills and found them in order and not excessively higher than normal. They were from Dr. David Farquhar, the Palms' medical director; Dr. Joel Mirliton, the radiologist who did the mammography; Dr. James Wilson, the surgeon specializing in cancer operations; Dr. Leon Jenner, the anesthetist; Dr. Ed Zumway, the administrator of the six-week radium treatment; and the Good Shepherd Catholic Hospital, for seven days' stay. The total bill, including extras, was $27,080.

When Mrs. Clay inspected the last bill, she shuddered, for she found items like 'Two aspirin $6.85; three gauze bandages $11.90; two Zantac pills $15.50' and a flood of other charges of many dollars each for items she could have purchased herself for pennies. But when she complained, Miss Foxworth said: 'Hospitals have to stay open so that when you need them, they're there. What they charge for any one item doesn't really count. They have to make the bill big enough to stay in business.'

'You think the bills, overall, are reasonable?'

'They're what we see all the time. If you'd had something that required six months in the hospital, eleven different doctors, total charges of upwards of a hundred thousand dollars, then you would really sweat.'

'All right. I agree that my bills are trivial by comparison. But how do I find my way out of this jungle of who pays for what? And how can I avoid having the collection agency destroy my credit because I didn't pay some bill I never knew about?'

'Mrs. Clay, remember this. Your case is not exceptional. Nobody has gone out of his way to do you harm. It's the system, especially the paperwork system. To tell you the truth, Mrs. Clay, you're one lucky woman! Dead one moment, alive and kicking the next.' Her final words were even more comforting: 'The good thing about all this is that once Medicare gets this case of mistaken identity straightened out, you may owe next to nothing. We'll just have to wait until we hear, then if you still owe a little, you'll pay up and not have to worry about it again.'

When the widow left the accounting office, Dr. Zorn asked: 'Was her case typical?' and Miss Foxworth used her left thumb to indicate the hundred and eighty-two residents in Gateways: 'Each one has his or her own special problems with health costs. So much paperwork, so many different systems, so much of what you might call "planned chaos," that I'm surprised anyone can keep his or her head above water.'

'Your own records? Can you keep them straight?'

She gave a mirthless laugh, reached in her top drawer and pulled out two letters warning her that unless she paid the delinquent bills they would be turned over to a collection agency: 'I'm the local expert and I can't understand my own accounts!'

The four men who constituted the tertulia were judged by the other residents to be the brains of Gateways, and the corner in which they met was viewed with awe and a touch of pride. They were presumed to be of such high intelligence that common folk could not really converse with them, and when word did leak out about what they had been discussing of an evening, people were apt to say something like 'What else would you expect of those brains?'

These assumptions of superior intelligence were fortified at the bridge table, where Senator Raborn and Ambassador St. Pres were so adroit in bidding and play that they were not allowed to be partners. As Ms. Opliphant complained: 'You simply cannot follow their bidding. You and your partner have ten clubs, but they open the bidding with two clubs, no way they could make it. Then they bid spades and diamonds and in the end one of them says four hearts and that's what they intended from the first, because partner jumps to six, and they make a slam.' The two experts explained several times that they used a variation of the Italian system and even wrote down what their various bids meant for all to see: that two diamonds showed heart strength and so on. During play they allowed their explanation to rest on the table, and when they made an esoteric cue bid they would point to the line on the card that explained what it signified, but still they won, so their partnership had to be outlawed.

Intellectual and bridge prowess aside, the men of the tertulia were remarkable for another reason-their age. One of them, Senator Raborn, was in his eighties; two of them, Ambassador St. Pres and President Armitage, in their late seventies; and one, editor Jimenez, had just turned seventy-one. They were about to demonstrate that even at their advanced years they enjoyed abilities and dreams no one could have imagined.

The adventure started one night after dinner when St. Pres said: 'The four of us ought to be engaged in a lot more than abstract philosophizing. We have the talents to attempt some big effort,' and the other three showed immediate interest. There was protracted discussion about what might be a practical project, and even after waiters cleared their table they remained huddled, discussing and rejecting proposals such as starting a class in a nearby junior college to be given some modest title like 'the wisdom of the world,' or the formation of a civics club that would teach high school students the true meaning of democracy. 'No,' the ambassador said, 'we're still spinning our wheels, still verbalizing. I intended something we could do with our hands.' When they pressed him for an example, he gave one that was so bizarre, so totally beyond normal reasoning, that at first the other three rejected it, but the more they talked and revealed hidden aptitudes, the more practical St. Pres's suggestion became until, sometime after eleven that night, the four men agreed upon what would be a gallant effort, preposterous perhaps, but one that would challenge and demand their full energies.

The program started early next morning when Senator Raborn, a man who knew how to get things done, called on Ken Krenek with a publicity brochure distributed by the Palms some years before: 'It says here in bold type that when functioning, the Palms will offer women comfortable nooks for teas and socials and bridge, and their husbands, and I quote: "a fully equipped hobby shop with hand tools and a lathe." I represent a committee asking that this promised amenity be provided. Now.'