“Your society is but vanity; what, then, shall be said of the festivities of Hades? We dine, and our Barmecide feast leaves a nauseating feeling of emptiness. Here amusement is the lash of correction. All is illusion; nothing is real. The fashions of all the centuries flourish here at one time, for every fashion which has had its day straightway goes to Hell. I sometimes think that is the principal reason why women are dissatisfied here; they had to follow the fashion in vogue while they were on the earth and when a late comer appears in a new style hat or dress the other women suffer torments worse than any Satan could devise, especially on Easter Sunday. “The twilight of Hades forms a sort of X-ray which passes through the clothes and flesh and enables us to see into the heart and mind of one another. The other day Paul Jones met George Washington, walking arm in arm with King George the Fourth. He stopped to say: “Admiral, I’m glad my children are giving you the honors which are justly yours.” Yet as his mind was as an open book, Jones read his thoughts thus: “‘Why couldn’t that meddlesome Porter let well enough alone, instead of bringing a mummy from France to oust me from my place as first in the hearts of my countrymen?’” Sherlock Holmes puffed reflectively on the shade of a cigar for a few moments; then knocking off an imaginary ash, he continued: “Whether matches are made in Heaven is a question, but they certainly are not made in Hell, despite the abundance of brimstone and the presence of Lucifer. Courtship is impossible where the heart betrays and fine words are belied by revealed thoughts, where the naked truth cannot be clothed in ‘fig’ language. When all reality has vanished, there can be no delusion, so that men who seldom spoke in the other world save to utter a falsehood have come to speak the truth here. There is only one exception—George Washington.” “You are rather hard on—”