# Ain't Angie Awful!/Chapter 7
### CHAPTER VII.
#### THE ADVENTURE OF THE BILLION DOLLAR BILL

ANGELA Bish was now twenty. Doesn’t that make you homesick, girls? Never mind; try to be brave. Into all lives some rain must fall—some girls must be over thirty. Anyway, if you’re not twenty your daughter may be.
Angie was already five feet long, including the two she had to start with, although it is true they had chilblains. Still, she was a pretty girl, if you didn’t look very hard. Her eyes, though small, were plainly visible and her mouth was similar to those found on some of our best known eaters. Her ingrowing chin, however, was sometimes mistaken for a lower lip.
“My one hope,” Angie’s mother had said, as she lay drowning of acute perspiration, “is that you won’t be like other girls. I want you to make something of yourself, Angie dear—something perfect!” And ​Angie did. She made a perfect fool of herself. It was a sacred duty.
Yes, Angie was by this time so foolish that she had never even heard of face powder, and had a theory that every decorated woman she met worked in a flour mill. Yes, she thought that the tango was a tropical fruit, that jazz was a popular drink and that men, when alone, talked only of women. She believed everything she saw in the movies, except the Norwegian travel pictures. Nobody believes those, of course. In the upper apartments of Angie’s head, in short, there was Nobody Home. Her brain was To Let. Inquire on the premises. But nobody did.
But to realize just how foolish Angie was one would have to be a boy octogenarian—young enough to understand, and yet old enough to believe it.
The fact is, Angie was neither girl nor woman. She wasn’t even a stenographer. She was a sort of feminine Bevo, with a denatured disposition guaranteed not to intoxicate. The more you had of Angie, in fact, the soberer you got. Few men had ever acquired a appetite for her—it took ​too long, and always left a yellowish feeling in the mouth, as of oakum, okra or mulligatawny.
And yet, poor thing, her craving for masculine attention amounted almost to erysipelas. At the faintest sign of approval Angie would pursue a man madly all the way across the Brooklyn Bridge, and then break into his house and demand of his wife that she sue him for a divorce.
“You have the children,” she would plead, “and you have had him for years. Don’t be so selfish—surely it is my turn, now!” Nothing could quell her determination but a dishpan full of red hot soap suds. For there was royal blood in Angie; her grandmother had been named Queenie.
Chilly it was in her bare bedroom, so childishly chilly that the poor girl had to eat the coal to keep her warm, even though it always gave her coal sores. She was so hungry that her feet ached. So, no wonder Angie was blue, dark blue! Also, she was getting that awful unkissed look that brings out one’s freckles so prominently. Her corsets, too, had been put on hind side before, that morning; and when a girl does that, Eddie, you ​can always make up your mind that she has given up hope.
But we must cheer up and go on.
Old Gomorrah Bish, Angie’s grandfather had just died. Some had believed that he would live forever; others thought he had already done so. Only once had he ever seen Angie; and then he was so spifflified that he had thought she was twins. So, in his deliritude, he decided to leave her twice as much as he had previously planned. He had fully intended to leave her nothing.
But he was so busy dying every day from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m., with only a half an hour off for lunch, that he forgot to leave a will. So, as Gomorrah never had had any children of his own Angie, his only grandchild was his sole heir.
This very morning her legacy had been received by mail. It was a big bright billion dollar bill. How Shakespeare would have loved that phrase! But oh dear, he will never know.
Why, then, was Angie so unhappy? One doesn’t get a billion dollars, you know, every day. Sometimes weeks go by before you get it; and even then you don’t, do you? It ​was so long, in fact, since poor Angie had seen a live billion dollar bill that she didn’t recognize it. She thought it was a trading stamp of some kind—a green trading stamp perhaps; certainly not a yellow one. She knew that much, anyway. It was no more use to her than a stepped-on chocolate drop or a subway ticket to Mars. Her dream of affluence had grown quite bald; her hopes were falling out every day.
That’s the way it goes in this world, especially with those whose brains have failed to coagulate. Listen: Opportunity knocks but once at every one’s door, and then usually goes right on and delivers the package to the wrong address. One girl for instance, will be so interested in listening to the phonograph that she fails to hear a rich Patagonian asking her to marry him, while another, a mere elevator girl, perhaps with a brass tooth will ring up the President of the First National Bank and get him to propose over the phone, thereby winning $10,000 a year alimony. But for further particulars see our small booklet. “Love Lures.” $1.50 post paid. Send no money.
And so Angie of the concave intellect, ​needing a curl paper, twisted up her front fetlock in the billion dollar bill, and then forgot all about it. But her disappointitude she could not forget. She was sore about it—as sore as if she had fallen off the top of the Woolworth Building at dawn; or possibly a few hours later.
Only once that day did Angie smile. It was when, in the Subway, a large insurance man trod on her foot. But, on watching him anxiously-hopeful for the follow-up, she was forced to conclude that it had been a mere accident. He seemed to be doing it to everybody. Aren’t men all polygamous?
The shock gave her a severe heartburn, and so she had to hold her foot in her lap all the way to Wall Street. From there to the Battery, however, the crowd thinned, and it wasn’t so embarrassing; she was able to rest her shoe on the knees of a Belgian Quartermaster with three wound stripes.
That forenoon, in the Comfy Underwear Factory, as Angela sat sewing buttons on the horsehair shirts, the girls saw tears wriggling out of her eyes. But they knew Angie ​was soft-hearted; she would weep even over her boiled eggs, when she found a poor little dead birdie inside. So they thought she had merely found another gray hair that day—possibly in her soup—and went right on chewing gum.
So fast came the tears that she could scarcely see, that afternoon, to fasten the wire netting in the seats of the celebrated Willwear Underwear. Ah, yes, there are often tragedies, dear reader, woven into the most inconspicuous portions of your geography. Little you know, when you sit down to your happy meal—but let that pass! It is too horrible. One sees so many tragedies in the movies what’s the good of having them in real life!
As the chickens were coming home to roost on Broadway, that evening, Angie was standing disconsolately on the corner of Madison Square voraciously eating the steam from a roasted peanut machine—it was all she could afford for dinner. As she waited idly, wondering why blondes would wear red hats, a beautiful whiskery gentle​man gravely approached her from the opposite direction to that in which she was eating. As he raised his silk hat, he was gnawing his mustache, and his sad smile smelt of licorice.
“Lady,” said he, “if indeed you are one, pardon me; but you look so much like that small, elongated musteloid carnivore known as the Putorius vulgaris that from across the street I thought you were a weasel; or peradventure you are only Welsh. Would you kindly give me your name?”
He put on his hat, ate a few more mustache, and bowed politely.
Angie not only gave him her name, but a look that made him smile into his mirror for the rest of his life. For he perceived by her expression that her brain had been thoroughly sterilized after all thinks had been removed from the shell. All, that is, save one, her favorite whim. She gave her name, in words of one syllable, as if broadcasting from XYZ.
“And now,” she concluded, “won’t you return the compliment and give me your name too—for keeps?”
This was the proper form of proposal, ​an aged colored psychic lady had once informed her, to address to a gent with salivated whiskers.
“Come with me,” said the stranger, for such he appeared to be, “I feel that you are to bring a great rectangular blessing into my life—it will be a debt I can never repay—I shall not even try to. For such as you I have long longed, longing.”
And he was right. To meet a girl at once rich and foolish—what man can have a greater ambition!
Once in the garlic atmosphere of Madison Square, however, amongst the tulips and bootblacks, his tone dropped several stitches. He seemed much colder. But then, not only was he sitting on a stone bench, but he was still guilty of wearing summer underwear. He looked her sternly in the hair.
“Woman,” he said, at last, “I cannot marry you. You smoke!”
In vain Angie denied it. It was only steam, she protested, that was coming from her mouth in the cold air. And on her fingers the yellow stains were merely bilious.
Frowning he shook his teeth and pointed to the curl athwart her brow. “Why, your ​very hair is curled with a Cigar Stores Certificate!” he exclaimed, “and the lips that touch Egyptians shall never touch mine; and the same goes for Turkey, Havana and Virginia and Porto Rico.” With a courteous gesture he tore the billion dollar bill from her head, put it into his vest pocket and fastened it with a hair pin.
It was for this alone he had lured her so far into the metropolis. Ah, yes, such things are done every day.
In another minute he was on board a Broadway car, laughing like a man who has just heard his divorced wife has married again.
But as the poet says, “’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have lost at all.” Angie could tell her grandchildren that one man had at least taken an option on her. To one man she had given her All.
That is, if she ever had any grandchildren. But to Angela Bish they seemed to be getting scarcer every day!