Page:Burgess--Aint Angie awful.djvu/23

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THE SIX-CENT STORE
17

please pay more attention. You may have missed that part about her crass brass bangles, her semi-diamond rings, and that hungry-sad Childs’ Restaurant expression of hers. Did I tell you that her ears were pointed? Well, they were not.

No one, in those dank days, had ever called Angie a Vimp. But that wasn’t her fault. Already she had got one job as a movie actress, but she was discharged because she hated having her photograph taken. Even as you and I she said she’d rather go to a dentist. Angie, in fact, didn’t know what a Vimp might be. Neither do I. But I think Angie wasn’t one of them; and I’m quite positive she wasn’t two. We both feel, don’t we, that she was far, far too young.

A straight orphan was Angela Bish, yet the neighbors said she was always ’round. All that she remembered of her father was that, while he was only a few weeks old, he had died while trying, with considerable success, to boil his own head, believing it to be a turnip—a red turnip, which, in fact, it almost was by the time it was rescued from the soup kettle. The Bishes could eat no chowder that day.