The Wrong Twin
and a new hat, the Wilbur twin would be one to whom Sabbath finery was exotic and unwelcome. The flawless lustre of his shoes would be dulled, even though he walked sedately the safe sidewalk; his broad collar and blue polka-dotted cravat would be awry, one stocking would be down, his jacket yawning, all his magnificence seeming unconquerably alien. Winona did him the justice to recognize that this disarray was due to no wilfulness of its victim. He was helpless against a malign current of his being.

He held himself stiff in the parlour until the Pennimans came rustling down the stairway. He could exult in a long look at the   benignant lion back of real bars, but, of course, he could not now reach up to touch the bars. It would do something to his clothes, even if the watchful and upright Merle had not been there to report a transgression of the rules. Merle also stood waiting, his hat nicely in one hand.

The judge descended the stairs, monumental in black frock coat, gray trousers, and the lately polished shoes that were like shining relief maps of a hill country. He carried a lustrous silk hat, which he now paused to make more lustrous, his fingers clutching a sleeve of his coat and pulling it down to make a brush. The hat was the only item of the judge's regal attire of which the Wilbur twin was honestly envious—it was so beautiful, so splendid, so remote. He had never even dared to touch it. He could have been left alone in the room with it, and still would have surveyed it in all respect from a proper distance.

Mrs. Penniman came next, rustling in black silk and under a flowered hat that Winona secretly felt to be quite too girlish. Then Winona from the door of her room above called to the twins, and they ascended the stairway for a last rite before the start for church, the bestowal of perfume upon each. Winona stood in the door of her room, as each Sunday she stood at this crisis, the cut-glass perfume bottle in hand. The twins solemnly approached her, and upon the white handkerchief of each she briefly inverted the bottle. The scent enveloped them delectably as the handkerchiefs were replaced in the upper left pockets, folded corners protruding correctly. As Wilbur turned away Winona swiftly moistened a finger tip in the precious stuff and drew it across the pale brow of Merle. It was a furtive tribute to his inherent social superiority.

Winona, in her own silk—not black, but hardly less severe—and in a hat less girlish than her mother's, rustled down the stairs after them. 
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