‘Why?’ asked Hyacinth. ‘Were your things cheaper or better?’
‘No,’ said the other, ‘I don’t think they were either. You see, prices are bound to come out pretty even in the long run, and I should say that, if anything, they sold a slightly better article. It’s hard to say exactly why we beat them. When competition is really keen a lot of little things that you would hardly notice make all the difference. For one thing, I get a free hand in the matter of subscribing to local bazaars and race-meetings. I’ve often taken as much as a pound’s worth of tickets for a five-pound note that some priest was raffling in aid of a new chapel. It’s wonderful the orders you can get from shopkeepers in that kind of way. Then, we get our things up better. Look at that.’
He handed Hyacinth a highly-glazed packet with a picture of a handsome brown dog on it.
‘Keep it,’ said Mr. Hollywell. ‘I give away twenty or thirty of those packets every week. Now look inside. What have you? Oh, H.M.S. _Majestic_. That’s one of a series of photos of “Britain’s first line of defence.” Lots of people go on buying those cigarettes just to get a complete collection of the photos. We supply an album to keep them in for one and sixpence. There’s another of our makes which has pictures of actresses and pretty women. They are extraordinarily popular. They’re perfectly all right, of course, from the moral point of view, but one in every ten is in tights or sitting with her legs very much crossed, just to keep up the expectation. It’s very queer the people who go for those photos. You’d expect it to be young men, but it isn’t.’
The subject was not particularly interesting to Hyacinth, but since his companion was evidently anxious to go on talking, he asked the expected question.
‘Young women,’ said Mr. Hollywell. ‘I found it out quite by accident. I got a lot of complaints from one particular town that our cigarettes had no photos with them. I discovered after a while that a girl in one of the principal shops had hit on a dodge for getting out the photos without apparently injuring the packets. The funny thing was that she never touched the ironclads or the “Types of the soldiers of all nations,” which you might have thought would interest her, but she collared every single actress, and had duplicates of most of them. And she wasn’t an exception. Most girls goad their young men to buy these cigarettes and make collections of the photos. Queer, isn’t it? I can’t imagine why they do it.’