s are not
allowed to have any. It is not right to let girls smoke. They get to
think too much of themselves if you let them do everything the same as
men. Oswald said, 'Out with it.'

'I see that glass bottles only cost a penny. H. O., if you dare to
snigger I'll send you round selling old bottles, and you shan't have any
sweets except out of the money you get for them. And the same with you,
Noel.'

'Noel wasn't sniggering,' said Alice in a hurry; 'it is only his taking
so much interest in what you were saying makes him look like that. Be
quiet, H. O., and don't you make faces, either. Do go on, Dicky dear.'

So Dicky went on.

'There must be hundreds of millions of bottles of medicines sold every
year. Because all the different medicines say, "Thousands of cures
daily," and if you only take that as two thousand, which it must be, at
least, it mounts up. And the people who sell them must make a great deal
of money by them because they are nearly always two-and-ninepence
the bottle, and three-and-six for one nearly double the size. Now the
bottles, as I was saying, don't cost anything like that.'

'It's the medicine costs the money,' said Dora; 'look how expensive
jujubes are at the chemist's, and peppermints too.'

'That's only because they're nice,' Dicky explained; 'nasty things are
not so dear. Look what a lot of brimstone you get for a penny, and the
same with alum. We would not put the nice kinds of chemist's things in
our medicine.'

Then he went on to tell us that when we had invented our medicine we
would write and tell the editor about it, and he would put it in
the paper, and then people would send their two-and-ninepence and
three-and-six for the bottle nearly double the size, and then when the
medicine had cured them they would write to the paper and their letters
would be printed, saying how they had been suffering for years, and
never thought to get about again, but thanks to the blessing of our
ointment--'

Dora interrupted and said, 'Not ointment--it's so messy.' And Alice
thought so too. And Dicky said he did not mean it, he was quite decided
to let it be in bottles. So now it was all settled, and we did not
see at the time that this would be a sort of going into business, but
afterwards when Albert's uncle showed us we saw it, and we were sorry.
We only had to invent the medicine. You might think that was easy,
because of the number of them you see every day in the paper, but it is
much har