“What word?” asked Malchen.
“Just to acknowledge that everything has got to be twenty-five per cent. dearer than it was twenty-five years ago.”
“But she does not like paying more, Fritz. That’s just the thing.”
“What does it matter what she pays?”
“I should think it mattered a great deal.”
“Not in the least. What does matter is whether she makes a profit out of the money she spends. Florins and zwansigers are but names. What you can manage to eat, and drink, and wear, and what sort of a house you can live in, and whether you can get other people to do for you what you don’t like to do yourself,—that is what you have got to look after.”
“But, Fritz;—money is money.”
“Just so; but it is no more than money. If she could find out suddenly that what she has been thinking was a zwansiger was in truth only half a zwansiger, then she would not mind paying two where she had hitherto paid one, and would charge two where she now charges one,—as a matter of course. That’s about the truth.”
“But a zwansiger is a zwansiger.”
“No;—not in her sense. A zwansiger now is not much more than half what it used to be. If the change had come all at once she could have understood it better.”