“Everything goes up together, of course. If you’ll look into old accounts you’ll see that three hundred years ago you could buy a sheep at Salzburg for two florins and a half. I saw, it somewhere in a book. If a lawyer’s clerk then had eighty florins a year he was well off. That would not surprise her. She can understand that there should be an enormous change in three hundred years; but she can’t make out why there should be a little change in thirty years.”
“But many things have got cheaper, Fritz.”
“Living altogether hasn’t got cheaper. Look at wages!”
“I don’t know why we should pay more. Everybody says that bread is lower than it used to be.”
“What sort of bread do the people eat now? Look at that man.” The man was Seppel, who was dragging a cart which he had just mended out of the shed which was close by,—in which cart were seated his three eldest children, so that he might help their mother as assistant nurse even while he was at his work. “Don’t you think he gets more wheaten flour into his house in a week than his grandfather did in a year? His grandfather never saw white bread.”
“Why should he have it?”
“Because he likes it, and because he can get it. Do you think he’d have stayed here if his wages had not been raised?”
“I don’t think Seppel ever would have moved out of the Brunnenthal, Fritz.”
“Then Seppel would have been more stupid than the cow, which knows very well on which side of the field it can find the best grass. Everything gets dearer;—and if one wants to live one has to swim with the stream. You might as well try to fight with bows and arrows, or with the old-fashioned flint rifles, as to live at the same rate as your grandfather.” The young lawyer, as he said this, rapped his pipe on the table to knock out the ashes, and threw himself back on his seat with a full conviction that he had spoken words of wisdom.
“What will it all come to, Fritz?” This Malchen asked with real anxiety in her voice. She was not slow to join two things together. It might well be that her mother should be induced by her pride to carry on the business for a while, so as to lose some of her money, but that she should, at last, be induced to see the error of her ways before serious damage had been done. Her financial position was too good to be brought to ruin by small losses. But during the period of her discomfiture she certainly would not be got to open her hand in that matter of the mitgift. Malchen’s own little affair would never get itself settled till this other question should have arranged itself satisfactorily. There could be no mitgift from a failing business. And if the business were to continue to fail for the next year or two, where would Malchen be then? It was not, therefore, wonderful that she should be in earnest.