Page:Burgess--Aint Angie awful.djvu/114

108 She was so sweet that after one taste of her you had to rush right off and eat sand. When she met a man she was so soft that she almost ran. The man ran, also.

Yet Angie was pretty enough, too. She had a mild Alderney expression on her face that was very restful. You always felt that she was just about to moo. But she never did; that was perhaps her only charm.

Only once in her life had Angie been kissed. The perpetraitor had been immediately removed to the Psychopathic Ward and treated with chopped ice; but to Angela Bish the event was so solemn and holy that she had not washed that kiss off her lips for a month, and on that last day you could distinctly see twenty-eight coffee rings surrounding her mouth.

One kiss in twenty-four years works out to about 1-8760 of a kiss per day. Now, no girl can live on such a pittance—at least, not in New York. She is bound to show traces of malnutrition, even if it doesn’t eventually run into glanders or the Willies. The effect upon Angie was terrible. She couldn’t use a telephone unless a man had  recently pressed his moustache against the