But wherever
two natures have a great deal in common, the conditions of a first-rate
quarrel are furnished ready-made. Relations are very apt to hate each other
just because they are too much alike. It is so frightful to be in an
atmosphere of family idiosyncrasies; to see all the hereditary uncomeliness
or infirmity of body, all the defects of speech, all the failings of
temper, intensified by concentration, so that every fault of our own finds
itself multiplied by reflections, like our images in a saloon lined with
mirrors! Nature knows what she is about. The centrifugal principle which
grows out of the antipathy of like to like is only the repetition in
character of the arrangement we see expressed materially in certain
seed-capsules, which burst and throw the seed to all points of the compass.
A house is a large pod with a human germ or two in each of its cells or
chambers; it opens by dehiscence of the frontdoor by-and-by, and projects
one of its germs to Kansas, another to San Francisco, another to Chicago,
and so on; and this that Smith may not be Smithed to death and Brown be
Browned into a mad-house, but mix in with the world again and struggle back
to average humanity.
Elsie's father, whose fault was to indulge her in everything, found that it
would never do to let these children grow up together. They would either
love each other as they got older, and pair like wild creatures, or take
some fierce antipathy, which might end nobody could tell where.
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