making conjectural
images at random, and wondering which was nearest to the truth. And to
neither of those who saw this meeting, for all they felt interest to
note what each would think of the other, did the thought come of any
very strong resemblance between them. They were two old women--that was
all!

And yet, in the days of their girlhood, these old women had been so much
alike that they were not allowed to dress in the same colour, for mere
mercy to the puzzled bystanders. So much alike that when, for a frolic,
each put on the other's clothes, and answered to the other's name, the
fraud went on for days, undetected!

It seems strange, but gets less strange as all the facts are sorted out,
and weighed in the scale. First and foremost the whole position was so
impossible _per se_--one always knows what is and is not possible!--that
any true version of the antecedents of the two old women would have
seemed mere madness. Had either spectator noted that the bones of the
two old faces were the same, she would have condemned her own powers of
observation rather than doubt the infallibility of instinctive
disbelief, which is the attitude of the vernacular mind not only to what
it wishes to be false, but to anything that runs counter to the
octave-stretch forlorn--as Elizabeth Browning put it--of its limited
experience. Had either noted that the eyes of the two were the same, she
would have attached no meaning to the similarity. So many eyes are the
same! How many shades of colour does the maker of false eyes stock, all
told? Guess them at a thousand, and escape the conclusion that in a
world of a thousand million, a million of eyes are alike, if you can. If
they had compared the hair still covering the heads of both, they would
have found Dave's comparison of it with Pussy's various tints a good and
intelligent one. Maisie was silvery white, Phoebe merely grey. But the
greatest difference was in the relative uprightness and strength of the
old countrywoman, helped--and greatly helped--by the entire difference
in dress.

No!--it was not surprising that bystanders should not suspect offhand
that something they would have counted impossible was actually there
before them in the daylight. Was it not even less so that Maisie and
Phoebe, who remembered Phoebe and Maisie last in the glory and beauty of
early womanhood, should each be unsuspicious, when suspicion would have
gone near to meaning a thought in the mind of each tha