Page:Burgess--Aint Angie awful.djvu/74

68 factory, seeing her giggle over her glue, decided that she must have received the  happy news of a death in the family.

She walked to the restaurant as if on hair.

And sure enough his mustache was green; and he must have been green himself to  take Angie so seriously. Few would have taken her at all. He held out a hand like twenty cents’ worth of bananas, and lifted  his two-quart hat.

“Angela,” he said, “long as I have known you—and it is now almost a whole minute—never have I seen you more beautiful!”

The compliment instantly went to her head, and there, in the great dim solemn  silent spaces, it roamed about like a tailless  cat in a cathedral. And her smile was that of one who has just borrowed a $400 squirrel coat to be photographed in. That is, if there are $400 squirrels. I doubt it.

She couldn’t eat. Indeed, long as she had practised the art, it was all she could do to do nothing. But he ate heartily and handily and greedily and gaudily in great glorious gosh-awful gobs. Like a fireman feeding a furnace, his knife went up and down.