Page:Burgess--Aint Angie awful.djvu/66

60 impossible. Then you must be, indeed you are, aren’t you, Miss Angela Bish?”

“I am,” said Angie, as she wildly endeavored to suffocate him with her long overdue embraces. “But don’t ask why. It’s chronic, but I still hope to have my last name, at least, cured.” Her hungry eyes burned like roasting chestnuts on an Italian’s frying pan.

“One moment!” The stranger untied her arms from his neck. “What I have to say will probably cause acute convulsions, so I beg you to be calm. Are you married?”

Angie shrieked. “I would give 5,000—”

“Nor engaged?”

“So much indeed am I not so, sir, that it has already threatened to run into insanity, if not more so.”

“Then I love you!”

Angela swooned. And in her ecstasy, it seemed to her that she was drowning in French ice cream covered with chocolate sauce in a new $90 Paris hat. Such bliss sometimes kills; and Angie, her lungs full of vanilla and pistachio, was going down for the third time, when she was slowly but  fiercely pinched back to life.