stitions
and heresies; they said the same things and sometimes did them; they
liked and disliked the same persons and places, the same books, authors
and styles; any one could see a certain identity even in their looks
and their features. It established much of a propriety that they were
in common parlance equally "nice" and almost equally handsome. But the
great sameness, for wonder and chatter, was their rare perversity in
regard to being photographed. They were the only persons ever heard of
who had never been "taken" and who had a passionate objection to it.
They just _wouldn't_ be, for anything any one could say. I had loudly
complained of this; him in particular I had so vainly desired to be able
to show on my drawing-room chimney-piece in a Bond Street frame. It was
at any rate the very liveliest of all the reasons why they ought to know
each other--all the lively reasons reduced to naught by the strange law
that had made them bang so many doors in each other's face, made them
the buckets in the well, the two ends of the see-saw, the two parties in
the state, so that when one was up the other was down, when one was out
the other was in; neither by any possibility entering a house till the
other had left it, or leaving it, all unawares, till the other was at
hand. They only arrived when they had been given up, which was precisely
also when they departed. They were in a word alternate and incompatible;
they missed each other with an inveteracy that could be explained only
by its being preconcerted. It was however so far from preconcerted
that it had ended--literally after several years--by disappointing and
annoying them. I don't think their curiosity was lively till it had been
proved utterly vain. A great deal was of course done to help them, but
it merely laid wires for them to trip. To give examples I should have
to have taken notes; but I happen to remember that neither had ever been
able to dine on the right occasion. The right occasion for each was the
occasion that would be wrong for the other. On the wrong one they
were most punctual, and there were never any but wrong ones. The very
elements conspired and the constitution of man reinforced them. A cold,
a headache, a bereavement, a storm, a fog, an earthquake, a cataclysm
infallibly intervened. The whole business was beyond a joke.

Yet as a joke it had still to be taken, though one couldn't help feeling
that the joke had made the situation serious, had pr