| |
| | “They are fools who kiss and tell”— |
| Wisely has the poet sung. |
| Man may hold all sorts of posts |
| If he’ll only hold his tongue. |
JENNY and Me were engaged, you see, | |
| On the eve of the Fancy Ball; | |
| So a kiss or two was nothing to you | |
| Or any one else at all. | |
| |
| Jenny would go in a domino— | 5 |
| Pretty and pink but warm; | |
| While I attended, clad in a splendid | |
| Austrian uniform. | |
| |
| Now we had arranged, through notes exchanged | |
| Early that afternoon, | 10 |
| At Number Four to waltz no more, | |
| But to sit in the dusk and spoon. | |
| |
| I wish you to see that Jenny and Me | |
| Had barely exchanged our troth; | |
| So a kiss or two was strictly due | 15 |
| By, from, and between us both. | |
| |
| When Three was over, an eager lover, | |
| I fled to the gloom outside; | |
| And a Domino came out also | |
| Whom I took for my future bride. | 20 |
| |
| That is to say, in a casual way, | |
| I slipped my arm around her; | |
| With a kiss or two (which is nothing to you), | |
| And ready to kiss I found her. | |
| |
| She turned her head and the name she said | 25 |
| Was certainly not my own; | |
| But ere I could speak, with a smothered shriek | |
| She fled and left me alone. | |
| |
| Then Jenny came, and I saw with shame | |
| She’d doffed her domino; | 30 |
| And I had embraced an alien waist— | |
| But I did not tell her so. | |
| |
| Next morn I knew that there were two | |
| Dominoes pink, and one | |
| Had cloaked the spouse of Sir Julian Vouse, | 35 |
| Our big Political gun. | |
| |
| Sir J. was old, and her hair was gold, | |
| And her eye was a blue cerulean; | |
| And the name she said when she turned her head | |
| Was not in the least like “Julian.” | 40 |
| |
| Now wasn’t it nice, when want of pice | |
| Forbade us twain to marry, | |
| That old Sir J., in the kindest way, | |
| Made me his Secretarry? | |
| |
