And, having delivered himself of this splendid proof of his poetic mind, Mr. Tedworth Jones glanced triumphantly around him.
"How sweet you do talk, to be sure, my dear Tedworth!" murmured the enraptured Clarissa Jemima. "It was your conversation," she added, in a loving whisper, "that first made an impression upon my heart."
"And did my poetry have no influence, dearest?" asked Mr. Jones, in a tone of increasing mawkishness, and so far above a whisper that the words were overheard by Mr. Chichester.
"Ah! now I have found you out, Mr. Jones!" cried this gentleman, who most probably had certain reasons of his own for playing the amiable towards the wealthy tripeman's heir: "you're a poet—eh? Well—I thought so from the very first. In fact you have the air of a poet—you wear your collar like a poet—you look altogether like a poet."
Now, although Mr. Tedworth Jones looked at that precise moment, and at most other moments also, more like an ass than a poet, he nevertheless felt the compliment in its most flattering sense; and after a considerable degree of whispering on his part with Clarissa, and giggling and whispering also on hers, it transpired that Mr. Tedworth Jones had addressed to his beloved a great variety of poetical compositions.
"And I can assure you that they are very pretty too," cried Mrs. Bustard, who was by no means an indifferent spectatress of this scene.
"But you should print them, my dear sir—you should print them," exclaimed Mr. Chichester. "Let the world welcome you at once as a great poet."
"Well," said Mr. Tedworth Jones, his whole countenance becoming as red as his hair, so that it seemed as if he were about to go off in a state of spontaneous combustion; "I did venture to print little piece a few weeks ago."
"Indeed!" said Chichester, apparently much delighted at this announcement: "in some periodical, I presume?"
"No—it was to have been struck off on a few sheets of gilt-edged paper—just to circulate privately amongst my friends, you know," replied Mr. Jones: "but really the compositors made such an awful mull of the first proof that I never had the courage to let them go on!"