Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). Verse: 1885–1918. 1922.
Pink Dominoes
J
On the eve of the Fancy Ball;
So a kiss or two was nothing to you
Or any one else at all.
Pretty and pink but warm;
While I attended, clad in a splendid
Austrian uniform.
Early that afternoon,
At Number Four to waltz no more,
But to sit in the dusk and spoon.
Had barely exchanged our troth;
So a kiss or two was strictly due
By, from, and between us both.
I fled to the gloom outside;
And a Domino came out also
Whom I took for my future bride.
I slipped my arm around her;
With a kiss or two (which is nothing to you),
And ready to kiss I found her.
Was certainly not my own;
But ere I could speak, with a smothered shriek
She fled and left me alone.
She’d doffed her domino;
And I had embraced an alien waist—
But I did not tell her so.
Dominoes pink, and one
Had cloaked the spouse of Sir Julian Vouse,
Our big Political gun.
And her eye was a blue cerulean;
And the name she said when she turned her head
Was not in the least like “Julian.”
Forbade us twain to marry,
That old Sir J., in the kindest way,
Made me his Secretarry?