CHAPTER XVI.
THE CLUB BECOMES POPULAR.
The influence of Wee Winnie on the war-path was soon apparent. On the following Wednesday morning the ante-room of the Club was as crowded with candidates as if Lillie had advertised for a clerk with three tongues at ten pounds a year. Silverdale had gone down to Fleet Street to inquire if anything had been heard of Miss Ellaline Rand's projected paper, and Lillie grappled with the applicants single-handed.
Turple the magnificent, was told to usher them into the confessional one by one, but the first two candidates insisted that they were one, and as he could not tell which one he gave way.
It is said that the shepherd knows every sheep of his flock individually, and that a superintendent can tell one policeman from another. Some music-hall managers even profess to distinguish between one pair of singing sisters and all the other pairs. But even the most trained eye would be puzzled to detect any difference between these two lovely young creatures. They were as like as two peas or two cues, or the two gentlemen who mount and descend together the mirror-lined staircase of a restaurant. Interrogated as to the motives of their would-be renunciation, one of them replied: "My sister and myself are twins. We were born so. When the news was announced to our father, he is reported to have exclaimed, 'What a misfortune!' His sympathy was not misplaced, for from our nursery days upward our perfect resemblance to each other has brought us perpetual annoyance. Do what we would, we never could never get mistaken for each other. The pleasing delusion that either of us would be saddled with the misdeeds of the other has got us into scrapes without number. At school we each played all sorts of pranks, making sure the other would be punished for them. Alas! the consequences have always recoiled on the head of the guilty party. We were not even whipped for neglecting each other's lessons. It was always for neglecting our own. But in spite of the stern refusal of experience to favor us with the usual imbroglio, we always went on hoping that the luck would turn. We read Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, and that confirmed us in our evil courses. When we grew up, it would be hard to say which was the giddier, for each hoped that the other would have to bear the burden of her escapades. You will have gathered from our friskiness that our parents were strict Puritans, but at last they allowed an eligible young curate to visit the house with a view to matrimony. He was too good for us; our parents were as much as we wanted in that line. Unfortunately, in this crisis, unknown to each other, the old temptation seized us. Each felt it a unique chance of trying if the thing wouldn't work. When the other was out of the room, each made love to the unwelcome suitor so as to make him fall in love with her sister. Wretched victims of mendacious farce-writers! The result was that he fell in love with us both!"
She paused a moment overcome with emotion, then resumed. "He proposed to us both simultaneously, vowed he could not live without us. He exclaimed passionately that he could not be happy with either were t'other dear charmer away. He said he was ready to become a Mormon for love of us."
He was willing to become a Mormon.