CHAPTER IV.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MAD PAPER-HANGER
NOT long did Angela Bish remain in her mackintoshes. She had tasted Romance à la subway.
For two days, now, she had winked, in the 199th Street Station, at a melancholy man in a slimy overcoat whose beard was full of big white blobs. He had smiled at her, she fancied; although, between you and me and the chewing-gum distributing machine, the red paint of which was being hungrily licked off by a half-starved tot, it may have been that misery, alas, too often draws only a smile from the thoughtless.
Be that as it may, let us return to life as it is lived north of 11th Street.
Angie lived on the memory of that smile all day; and at night she warmed it over for supper. Already life had changed for Angie; and, inversely, Angie had changed for life.
The third day, greatly daring, she returned his grin in even better condition than she had found it.
THAT EMBRACE WAS A REVELATION OF RAPTURE TO ANGIE, WHO STILL HAD AN AMATEUR RATING
But I was speaking, you may remember, of our foolish heroine.
That embrace was a revelation of rapture to Angie, who still had an amateur rating. How beardy his beard was!—and his hands were soft and cold and moist. At first she thought they were raw oysters. She had always loved oysters, always would. She was happier than she had been since she ate her first hair sandwich. Nevertheless, we must not leave her too long in the embrace of an imperfect stranger.
“I have found you at last!” With difficulty the words came through the thick brown beard. It was he who spoke. Angie had no beard. She was far too young.
“Just one moment to buy a toothbrush," she replied, “and I shall be Yours Sincerely.” And Angela smiled.
Now there are smiles that make one, and there are smiles that make one blue. Her confession seemed to strike him funny, like a cranberry pie in the face.
A LEPROUS BUNGALOW, THEY FOUND
Indeed, all the way to Harlem he seemed depressed; but then, they were going to Harlem. Curiously enough the object of their journey is the subject of my next sentence.
A leprous bungalow, entirely surroundded by goats, they found, ramshackled to a high cliff overlooking an ash barrel. There Angie was pushed through the front door, and behind her he slyly turned the key in the lock. She was, in fact, locked in, if you get what I mean. They were at last alone. . . .
Now many authors would make a good deal out of a compromising situation like that. But you scarcely need to know more; you also have a morbid imagination. Yes, as I have promised the editor to tell the whole truth, I shall not flinch from the facts. I shall tell you all—all. And I shall not even use asterisks.
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He led her to the kitchen, and he led her to the stove. There, pointing to a huge bucket of paste, “Fry this!” he commanded. “’Tis too sour to stick to the walls, and, woman, I must be fed!”
Often, in future years, Angie was to remember those miserably happy meals, and how, afterwards, a mutual indigestion drew them together. When at last the bucket was empty they munched scraps of wall paper, and their faces began to break out in spots of mauve and yellow, not to speak of elsewhere. It was a great satisfaction, however, to know that it was at least dining-room paper.
Yet even then Angie was not satisfied. And finally, in her despair, she cried, “At least yon might wash your beard, O my love, and then when I kiss you perhaps I wouldn’t be so stuck on you!”
The paper hanger was aqueduct to the occasion.
Maddened by the world-old cry, “Do you love me? Don’t you love me?” he arose and pasted her over and over with layer upon layer of the most expensive wall papers. Then, when she was quite covered with the pink cretonne, he pasted her up in front of the back-parlor wall which was decorated with a similar pattern. There, thank God, she was for a while invisible, though still from her camouflage came weak, wan peeps of love.
That day Angela did the hardest work she had ever done. She thought. And when she had clawed herself loose, her mind was made up like an Upper 7. This time he should not escape her!
Hiding in the oven of the lofty range, where he had forced her to sleep o’ nights, she watched him enter and give a glad howl to find himself alone. Then, while he was absorbedly removing a wad of gum from his heel, behold, she sprang upon him, clasped him in a fond embrace—and clung.
Reader, bear in mind that I expressly reserve all emotion picture rights. The desperate girl had coated herself from hair to heel with paste! It was sour but sticky.
Alas, for him, there was now no getting away. Never had he found a woman so attractive, never one who could hold him so long. When he had tired of them, he had always cast them carelessly aside. But not so Angela Bish, the clinger. Proud as he was of his early struggles as a paper hanger, they were nothing to the writhings with which he now sought to regain his freedom.
It was useless, of course, to appeal to the Supreme Court for a separation. They were not yet married. But, as he fought, an idea, bright as the Star Spangled Banner, carried him and equally her (Oh, say can you see them, welded together like two bars of chocolate in the dawn’s early light?) towards the bathroom!
Before she had time to regret having left 
FROM A ROLL OF GREEN CARTRIDGE PAPER SHE FASHIONED THE SIMPLE ROBE IN WHICH SHE FLEDDED
And as he clumb the slippery-soapy porcelain marge, Angela Bish sank to the bottom for the third time, her hopes drowning with her.
How long she stayed there, she never knew nor cared. But when she had dried her eyes and hair, he had fled. Seldom did she see him more.
From a roll of green cartridge paper she fashioned the simple robe in which she fledded. And all the way home on that Lexington Avenue car she sadly asked herself, “Why? Why? Why?”
Even thoughtless strangers, usually, as you know, so unsympathetic, gazing at her ultra-modish garb, and the gobs of paste upon her neck and pallid eyebrows, they likewise asked themselves, each other, and the conductor, “Why?”