He opened a fat ledger, took up a pencil, and began to jot down figures on the back of one of the envelopes. Already, by remodelling the the theatre, he had lost two month's headway, and spent three times too much money, and if Sunday performances were to be eliminated.... He threw down the pencil, and sat back spiritless. The good-wishes of all his friends, last night, had turned sour in his possession. To reach his goal, he should have to contrive, somehow, to fill nearly every seat at nearly every performance for the balance of the year. It was all well enough to have self-confidence, and courage, but it was better to look facts in the face. He had come to an impasse. Not only that, but overnight his property, by virtue of this Sunday enforcement and its effect upon the trade, had seriously depreciated in value. If it had been worth thirty-seven thousand five hundred yesterday, it wasn't worth a penny more than twenty today. And he could have had Standish's certified check, and got out from under. And he had thrown away in improvements almost every cent that he had borrowed against the original value. He was hardly better off, today, than if he had carried through his first bargain with Mr. Mix.
He would have to go home to Anna, and confess that he was beaten by default. He would have to explain to her, as gently as he could, that the road which led to the end of the rainbow was closed to traffic. He would have to admit to her that as far as he could see, he was destined to go on living indefinitely in a jerry-built apartment, with the odour of fried onions below, and the four children and the phonograph overhead. And Anna would have to go on pinch-hitting for cook, and waitress, and chambermaid, and bottle-washer--she would have to go on with the desecration of her beautiful hands in dish-water, and the ruin of her complexion over the kitchen-stove. The clothes that he had planned to buy for her, the jewels, the splendid car--the cohort of servants he had planned for her--the social prestige! And instead of that, he was nothing but a fragment of commercial driftwood, and he couldn't afford, now, to buy her so much as a new hat, without a corresponding sacrifice.