bless(\$text, $class); is blessing a reference - and because bless returns the blessed value as well as acting directly upon it, the subroutine *does* return a blessed reference. See for example:

my $foo = "bar";
print bless \$foo, "Test";
[download]

Update: Apologies to jeffa, I got confused and was reading the wrong code when replying. The OP is indeed trying to bless a non-ref scalar, which would lead to an error: Can't bless non-reference value

/J\