This was uncomfortable; but when Schlessen came out he raised her spirits.
“Perhaps old Weiss won’t come,” he said, “but then there will be plenty in his place. There are houses like the Peacock all over the country now, in the Engadine, and the Bregenz, and the Salzkammergut; and it seems to me the more they charge the fuller they are.”
“But they are for the grand folk.”
“For anybody that chooses. It has come to that, that the more money people are charged the better they like it. Money has become so plentiful with the rich, that they don’t know what to do with it.”
This was a repetition of Mr. Cartwright’s barn full of gold. There was something in the assertion that money could be plentiful, in the idea that gold could be a drug, which savoured to her of innovation, and was therefore unpleasant. She still felt that the old times were good, and that no other times could be so good as the old times. But if the people would come and fill her house, and pay her the zwansiger and a half extra without grumbling, there would be some consolation in it.
Early in June Malchen made a call at the house of the Frauleins Tendel. Malchen at this time was known to all Innsbruck as the handsome Frau Schlessen who had been brought home in the winter to her husband’s house with so very comfortable a mitgift in her hand. That was now quite an old story, and there were people in the town who said that the young wife already knew quite as much about her husband’s business as she had ever done about her mother’s. But at this moment she was obeying one of her mother’s commands.
“Mother hopes you are both coming out to the Brunnenthal this year,” said Malchen. The elder fraulein shook her head sadly. “Because——” Then Malchen paused, and the younger of the two ladies shook her head. “Because you always have been there.”
“Yes, we have.”
“Mother means this. The change in the price won’t have anything to do with you if you will come.”
“We couldn’t think of that, Malchen.”