"That's the fun!" declared Nell, and he pondered her cryptic utterance ruefully.
It was "fun." Ted's awful and desperate rhymes made them shout with laughter. He mournfully dubbed Denis a beastly poet, and eyed him with reproach. Then suddenly his face cleared. With a bland gravity he asked Nell to have a cake, and left the request rhymeless. To the chorus of "Rhyme! Rhyme!" he responded amiably that he was speaking in blank verse, and from the refuge of blank verse they could not move him. In vain the Atom, her metre waxing wilder and wilder, as her indignation grew, in vain she strove to shame him into rhyming. He gazed at her with ever increasing enjoyment. To her madly rhyming vituperation he responded with gentle obstinacy. And he stuck to his blank verse like an Englishman, and a very unpoetical one.
"Oh!" exclaimed Nell, later on in the evening, "I want to show you something. Now, you remember our broken purchases the other day? Behold the legless doll!"
Ted gravely took it and examined a pair of somewhat shapeless, but plump white linen extremities stuffed with wool.
"The shaftless cart! The paintless boat! The one-armed doll! The headless lady! The three-legged cat!" One after another he examined them. He was a good deal amused, but full of admiration; seeing which Nell dragged out further examples of their art.
"Tell me what that is."
She held up a very corpulent, grey stuffed pincushion on four legs.
Ted stared uneasily.
"Be careful, old chap," warned Denis, from the armchair. "It's Nell's pet admiration, and made by herself."
"A pig?" he queried uncertainly.