Page:Burgess--Aint Angie awful.djvu/72

66 kindly, liked to pursue an elusive woman, like a cake of soap in a wet bathtub—even  men did who hated baths. But poor Angie began to smile when a man was blocks away, and kept it up till the cops asked her if she  were looking for the Home for the Feeble Minded.

Yet she was fair—at least, fairly fair. She would have made a good wife for any dead husband. Besides her talent for gum-chewing, for which she had received a gold medal at the Garbage Collectors’ Annual Ball, she had incipient hydrophobia and many other accomplishments. But they accomplished little in the way of a husband.

The fact was, Angie was usually sound asleep in and around the region between the ears, and she woke up only when marriage was proposed, usually by herself. Brains she had nix. The only answer she knew was “Yes”; and that didn’t get her very far with the tightwads she knew, unless they happened to ask her did she want a trolley ride.

Yet it is always darkest just before Christmas. Even as she pored over the first lesson in the Correspondence School of Sui-