Page:Burgess--Aint Angie awful.djvu/82

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76
AIN’T ANGIE AWFUL!

Angie did. She made a perfect fool of herself. It was a sacred duty.

Yes, Angie was by this time so foolish that she had never even heard of face powder, and had a theory that every decorated woman she met worked in a flour mill. Yes, she thought that the tango was a tropical fruit, that jazz was a popular drink and that men, when alone, talked only of women. She believed everything she saw in the movies, except the Norwegian travel pictures. Nobody believes those, of course. In the upper apartments of Angie’s head, in short, there was Nobody Home. Her brain was To Let. Inquire on the premises. But nobody did.

But to realize just how foolish Angie was one would have to be a boy octogenarian—young enough to understand, and yet old enough to believe it.

The fact is, Angie was neither girl nor woman. She wasn’t even a stenographer. She was a sort of feminine Bevo, with a denatured disposition guaranteed not to intoxicate. The more you had of Angie, in fact, the soberer you got. Few men had ever acquired a appetite for her—it took