Oh, yes, I knew what she meant. And though, as Iris said, many things must have been changed between them since I had known them together, yet it seemed that this indefinable sense of their likeness had not changed. It had been unlooked for and quite remarkable even to a not very observant schoolboy as I was, this similarity between such very different brothers as Poole I and Poole II. Roger, quiet, feverish, the best classical scholar in the school, a head-prefect whose authority was severely respected by every one (except Antony, who, however, never seemed to come directly into contact with it), and the first string of our racquets pair at Queens for four years; and Antony, as I've explained, the very opposite, a slacker at work but our best fast bowler and three-quarter--games, said Roger, which it made him sweat to think about. And so, as each went his so very different way, it had puzzled my schoolboy mind to discover in what lay this similarity between their natures, one whose existence had grown upon me as I had become more intimate with them: some deep down, inarticulate sameness, that was at first obscured by the great variance of their personalities, but so strong a sameness that it must show itself as one came to know them--so, anyway, I had incoherently thought at that time. And later, after we had left school, had so seldom seen them even in the same company, that I quite forgot my curiosity about the subtlety--so that when Iris now brought it again to my mind I was where I had been at school; and not likely, I thought, to get very much further. But I had been really surprised to hear of the obvious pleasure they took in each other's company, of their mutual sympathy and interest. In that, indeed, the years between had made a change! For if their likeness had been ever so dimly apparent to me at school, not so any interest the one might have in the other. They neither showed any nor pretended to any, they went their own ways with a quite unforced indifference; and it would have been better if, when they met, they had met as indifferently--but Antony seemed unable to resist an unpleasantry, to which Roger's generally silent contempt seemed a more than sufficient answer. In fact I rather sympathised with the jeers that Antony now and then flung at him as he passed, for Roger's kind of contempt seemed to have behind it enough conviction to provoke even a reasonable man to a show of temper--and Antony reasonable! But somehow or other Roger cleverly managed not to provoke him beyond the limit until a few days before the end of his last term. I can swear that he purposely brought on that burst, kept Antony's temper dangerously dangling--until after supper that night when he, somehow, finally goaded him into making a perfect ass of himself before the whole house. Poor Antony, so unfairly matched against that grim quietness!