Page:Burgess--Aint Angie awful.djvu/118

112 “What colored sole?” Angie asked, dreadfully.

“Lavender.”

Hoping against hope, Angie meditatively took off one slipper. But what color her sole proved to be, I hesitate to say. Yet it was not lavender; I’m terribly sure of that. Angie’s stockings, you see, were rather scarcely, that week, and besides she had been for hours absent-mindedly wandering  about in the coal bin, trying to find a pet  poached egg. And even the Duchess of Westminster, you know, might have got a  little dusty, mightn’t she not have might?

Angie’s visitor looked modestly away. He hadn’t been so shocked since a missionary had told him that there were savage tribes in Central Africa who had never been manicured.

“Not the soul of your foot,” he explained, “What I want to see, my dear, is your psychic self. That’s the current slang you know, for your inmost ego.”

“I had ’em all pulled out,” said Angie, “when I was sixteen. They gave me cankers. Don’t you think marriage is a beautiful disease?”