Writing prompt inspired by Elizabeth Inchbald

Elizabeth Inchbald started her novel Nature and Art with:

At a time when the nobility of Britain were said, by the Poet Laureate, to admire and protect the arts, and were known by the whole nation to be the patrons of music - William and Henry, youths under twenty years of age, brothers, and the sons of a country shopkeeper who had lately died insolvent, set out on foot for London, in the hope of procuring by their industry a scanty subsistence.
As they walked out of their native town, each with a small bundle at his back, each observed the other drop several tears: but, upon the sudden meeting of their eyes, they both smiled with a degree of disdain at the weakness in which they had been caught.

Use the above as inspiration to write a story about two characters who begin with a shared circumstance before diverging and coming into conflict with one another.