"The Twins" was a promising scenario from Lois Weber among her early Rex productions. It's about twin sisters, both played by the writer-director-star Weber, but with a bifurcated plot separating them, so there's no multiple-exposure tricks for the dual roles to be fascinated by as in, say, "The Student of Prague" films (1913 and 1926), Mary Pickford's "Stella Maris" (1918) and "Little Lord Fauntleroy" (1921), Douglas Fairbanks in "Don Q Son of Zorro" (1925), Rudolph Valentino in "The Son of the Sheik" (1926), Buster Keaton in the "The Playhouse" (1921), Georges Méliès in just about every other film he ever made, even Tyrone Power in another Weber film, "John Needham's Double" (1916)... oh, heck, there's an entire thread on the subject at the Nitrateville message boards.
Besides a vanity project for stars and challenging camera work for cinematographers, the dual role is interesting as an inherently reflexive notion. Cinema, after all, is all about the reproduction of images, from the recording of life to the film's duplication in distribution. In this one, there's even one sister who dies--becoming the ghost to the living referent, à la cinema. This veers towards conjecture, however, without Weber having explicitly linked the twins to the art of reproduction.
Even in the early days of one-reelers at Rex and throughout her later features, Weber highlighted the reflexivity of her oeuvre by including art in the narratives, whether statues in "From Death to Life" (1911), painting in "Fine Feathers" (1912), photographs in "A Japanese Idyll" (1912) (and in "How Men Propose" (1913), although Weber's involvement in that film remains speculative), mirrors and reflections from "Suspense" (1913) to "Hypocrites" (1915) and "Too Wise Wives" (1921), ballet in "The Dumb Girl of Portici" (1916), theatre in "False Colors" (1914), heck even the courtroom theatrics in "Where Are My Children?" (1916) and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" (1917), and the film-within-the-film in "Idle Wives" (1916). Sans art, what we're left with is a none-too-interesting story, a bit of mistaken identity and with contrived drama involving a sick mother and that doesn't seem to include even a muddled commentary on class despite one twin being adopted by a poor mother and the other by a rich family (as a present to marry their son in the future, oddly enough).
The use of miniatures, while noticeable, of course, for the fatal elopement car crash is nonetheless neat, though.