Twain paints a picture of an all female family of four: Margaret Lester, widow; her 16 year old daughter, Helen; and Margaret’s extremely proper twin maiden aunts, Hannah and Hester Gray, aged 67. It is a household in which "a lie had no place. In it a lie was unthinkable. In it speech was restricted to absolute truth, iron-bound truth, implacable and uncompromising truth, let the resulting consequences be what they might." With this background, Twain sets up a perfect scenario of hide-bound morality only to turn it on its head, an iconoclastic trick for which he is deservedly well known.
The doctor caring for the mother and daughter, suffering from typhoid, cuts the aunts’ pietistic morality about lying to shreds, demonstrates the shallow logic and inconsistency of it and predicts they will lie in a greater fashion than they can imagine. True to form, Twain has the aunts go to great lengths to falsify the condition of the critically ill daughter to the mother to prevent the truth from worsening her condition. The title derives from the final lines of the story when an angel of the Lord comes to their house and delivers the judgment for all their lies, a judgment the reader is asked to guess: Was it Heaven? Or Hell?
