"You can say if
I said it, you couldn't print it anyway."

And although the reporter paced him for a quarter of a mile, Henry
never opened his mouth again. He was curiously obsessed, as men under
heavy mental pressure are so often obsessed, by a ridiculously trivial
detail. How was he going to enter that forty-five dollars on his
books?

He had intended to go straight home to Anna, but automatically his
steps led him to the Orpheum, where he went into his tiny office and
sat down at his desk. There were two envelopes on his blotter; he slit
them, diffidently, and found a bill from the novelty house which had
supplied the souvenirs, and a supplementary statement from the
decorator.

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
t