Every bride is beautiful. Every bride looks charming in a simple costume of—for further particulars see local papers. Every marriage is a cause for universal rejoicing. With our wine-glass in our hand we picture the ideal life we know to be in store for them. How can it be otherwise? She, the daughter of her mother. (Cheers.) He—well, we all know him. (More cheers.) Also involuntary guffaw from ill-regulated young man at end of table, promptly suppressed. We carry our make-believe even into our religion. We sit in church, and in voices swelling with pride, mention to the Almighty, at stated intervals, that we are miserable worms—that there is no good in us. This sort of thing, we gather, is expected of us; it does us no harm, and is supposed to please. We make-believe that every woman is good, that every man is honest—until they insist on forcing us, against our will, to observe that they are not. Then we become very angry with them, and explain to them that they, being sinners, are not folk fit to mix with us perfect people. Our grief, when our rich aunt dies, is hardly to be borne. Drapers make fortunes, helping us to express feebly our desolation. Our only consolation is that she has gone to a better world. Everybody goes to a better world when they have got all they can out of this one. We stand around the open grave and tell each other so. The clergyman is so assured of it that, to save time, they have written out the formula for him and had it printed in a little book. As a child it used to surprise me—this fact that everybody went to heaven. Thinking of all the people that had died, I pictured the place overcrowded. Almost I felt sorry for the Devil, nobody ever coming his way, so to speak. I saw him in imagination, a lonely old gentleman, sitting at his gate day after day, hoping against hope, muttering to himself maybe that it hardly seemed worth while, from his point of view, keeping the show open. An old nurse whom I once took into my confidence was sure, if I continued talking in this sort of way, that he would get me anyhow. I must have been an evil-hearted youngster. The thought of how he would welcome me, the only human being that he had seen for years, had a certain fascination for me; for once in my existence I should be made a fuss about.