Well, this was reasonable and no doubt true and it left Rose rather aghast.  She turned away toward the stage with the best appearance of indifference she could muster.  Her mind was making an agonized effort to add up one hundred and ninety, fifty and twenty.  But in the excitement of the moment it simply balked—­rejected the problem altogether.  She didn’t think that the total came to much over three hundred dollars, but she couldn’t be sure.  And then there was, sticking burr-like, somewhere, the consciousness of another hundred unaccounted for in this total.  Until she could discover what the gowns had actually cost her, she couldn’t say anything.  Therefore, she just stood where she was and said nothing whatever.

Goldsmith cleared his throat.  “Really,” he said in an intensely aggrieved tone, “you must try to see it from our point of view.  This production’s cost us thousands of dollars.  If we bankrupt ourselves before the opening night it will be a bad business for everybody.  You ought to see that.  The costumes are very nice, I admit that.  But remember we took a chance on it.  We waited for them with the idea that you’d cooperate with us in saving money.”

Rose made a last frantic struggle to induce her figures to add up, but they were getting more meaningless every minute.

There was another moment of silence.  Then Block took up the refrain with variations.  But just as he began to speak, a brilliantly luminous ray of light struck Rose.  She could have answered Goldsmith’s arguments—­would have done so, but for her preoccupation with that trifling sum in arithmetic.  But it was incomparably better tactics not to answer at all.  Because if she could answer their arguments, they in turn could answer hers.  She’d be a child in their hands once she began to talk.  But her silence disconcerted them—­gave them nothing to go on.  Well, then, she’d let them do the work and see what happened.

But suppose, through her stubborn insistence, they should refuse the costumes at any price!  Well, the world wouldn’t come to an end.  She’d live through it somehow, and somehow she’d manage to repay Galbraith.

The partners went on talking alternately with symptoms of rising impatience.

“Oh, come,” said Block at last, “we can’t be all day about this!  Your figure is out of all reason.  If you’d said even four hundred now ...”

“Oh, yes,” said Goldsmith.  “We want to be liberal.  We appreciate you’ve done a good job.  Say four hundred and I’ll write you a check for it now.”  He took a small check-book and a fountain pen out of his pocket.  “That’s all right, eh?”

Rose made another effort at addition.  A hundred and ninety, and fifty, and twenty, and the other ghostly hundred that wouldn’t account for itself and yet insisted on coming in and mixing everything up.  She turned on the two partners a look of perfectly genuine distress.

“If you’ll let me go away and add it up ...” she began.