Much loved I know I am by the very way he looks at me, strokes my hair, whispers my name, stares angrily at Amelia when upon some pretext she lingers in the room after bringing in coffee and won't leave us alone.
Ah, that being alone! How delightful it is. We have enjoyed that best of all. We had so few opportunities before we were married, Peter appearing to think it was our duty to play whist each evening, with most cheerful countenances; and were I, out of sheer desperation, to trump his best card, he would scream with annoyance.
But I'm not getting on with Dimbie's points. I think his dearest friend, or even his wife or mother, would be over-stepping the strict boundary-line of truth were they to describe him as handsome. He's not handsome. For which Nanty, mother's old schoolfellow, says I should be deeply grateful. Handsome men, she tells me, have no time to admire their own wives, so taken up are they with their own graces, which is a pity for the wives.
In addition to the crooked nose I mentioned Dimbie has also a crooked mouth, giving him the most humorous, comical, and at the same time the most kindly expression. I wouldn't have Dimbie's mouth straight for the world. It droops at the left corner. He opines that he was born that way, that it must be a family mouth, at which his mother is extremely indignant. She asserts that the mouths in her family at any rate were quite perfect, and that this droop is the result of a horrid pipe which was never out of the corner of his mouth, alight or dead, throughout his college days. Dimbie laughs at this, and says shall he grow a moustache to cover up the defect, and I say No, he shan't.
The crook of his mouth and nose happen to be in opposite directions, so even when he's depressed he looks quite happy and amused.
Nature, trying to balance things up a little, then gave him jolly, blue, twinkling eyes, and crisp brown hair with little kinks in it.
He will be thirty-one on the second of next month. His mother, whom I have only once seen and that was at our wedding, doesn't approve of his telling his age to any casual inquirer in his usual direct manner, for it naturally gives her own age away. Mrs. Westover, Nanty says, imagines she would pass for under forty when the wind is in the west.
"Why west?" mother and I had cried together.
"A soft damp west wind will make a woman look ten years younger," said Nanty sagely. "It is a north wind which works such havoc with her complexion."
Mother and I have learnt a great deal from Nanty one way or another, and the funny part of it is that the information which doesn't matter always seems to stick in my memory, while important things go, which Dimbie says is the way of the world.