GIBSON:  No; I wouldn’t mind telling you.  I’d like to tell you.

NORA:  You think there isn’t any?

GIBSON:  I’m sure there isn’t any.

NORA:  Then I’m afraid we’ll have to get some back from the people we sold to.  Of course I’m anxious to show the great financial improvement as well as other improvements.  That’s partly my province and Mr. Carter’s, our committee chairman, besides our regular work.

GIBSON:  Mr. Mifflin tells me that you had a sort of general manager for a while at first.

CARTER:  Oh, that was Hill, the head bookkeeper.  He left.  He was a traitor to the comrades.

GIBSON:  Hill?  He knew quite a little about the business.  Why did he leave?

CARTER:  Why, that Coles-Hibbard factory went and offered him a big salary to come over there; more than he thought he could get cooeperatin’ with us.

NORA:  Hill was always a capitalist at heart.  We certainly haven’t needed him!

CARTER:  Oh, everybody was glad to get rid of Hill!  Better off without him—­better off without him!

GIBSON:  I suppose it was really an economy, his going?

NORA [smiling]:  It resulted in economy.

GIBSON:  Have you made many economies?

NORA:  Oh, a great many!

CARTER:  Oh, my!  Yes!

NORA:  Economies! [Her manner now is indulgent, amused, friendly, almost pitying.] Mr. Gibson, have you any realization of what you threw away at that place?  Don’t be afraid, I’ll never bring you the figures.  I wouldn’t do such a thing to anybody!

GIBSON:  Do you think I was too lavish?

NORA:  We couldn’t believe it at first.  Just what was being thrown away on advertising, for instance.  The bill you paid for the last month you were there was five thousand dollars!

CARTER:  That was the figger!  It’s certainly a good one on you, Mr.
Gibson.

NORA:  We cut that five thousand dollars down to three hundred!  That was one item of forty-seven hundred dollars a month saved.  Just one item!

CARTER [hilariously]:  Quite some item!

NORA [seriously and gently]:  Five thousand dollars a month to advertise a piano that sells for only a hundred and eighty-eight dollars!

CARTER:  That’s the facts!

NORA:  Mr. Gibson, did you really ever have any idea what you were paying in commissions to agents?

GIBSON:  Yes, I did.

NORA:  Why, I can’t believe it!  Did you know that you paid them twenty per cent. on each piano?  Over thirty-seven dollars!

GIBSON:  Yes.

NORA:  But wasn’t it thrown away?  I can’t understand how you kept the factory going so long as you did, with such losses.  Why, don’t you know it amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year?  When we found it out we couldn’t see how you made both ends meet, and we thought there must have been some mistake, and you’d never realized what advantage these agents were taking of you.