Page:Burgess--Aint Angie awful.djvu/26

20 than usual. She yawned, rose and went to work combing the lime powder from her ears and nostrils.

“Oh, I’m going to have good luck today!” she exclaimed, as the toothbrush went through the locks of her glossy hair. Poor child! She had found only seven cockroaches in the water pitcher. It takes so little to make a young girl happy!

An aged egg she fried in a sardine tin, over a candle, now, and washed it down with a baked ham and the northeastern half of an English plum pudding with champagne sauce, left over from her frugal little dinner of the night before. For her dessert—only the candle-end; and you know yourself how tasteless candles are, without sugar. Next, after oiling herself all over with butter, she wriggled into her blue sausage skirt, and put on her hat. It looked like a cuspidor, but it wasn’t. Angela never wore them.

Then it was that her great moment came. For years and years she had tried every morning, before the mirror, and every time she had failed. Today something seemed to snap in her—it must have been her conscience strings—and without the slightest