But the newspaper revelation, in giving me a turn, had turned me philosophic-side-upward; and I cared little for Alf's sullenness, provided he listened with attention to my discourse on the mutability of things. By the time he had poured out my tea, he was a vanquished man. He filled a cup for himself, to keep me company, and guardedly commented on the news I brought from the station and the Pine-ridge Gate. Still I was touched to observe that he kept his disfigured face averted as much as possible.
Did you ever reflect upon how much you have to be thankful for in the matter of noses? Your nose, in all probability, is your dram of eale—your club foot—your Mordecai sitting at the king's gate—but you would look very queer without it. In your morbid hypercriticalness, you may wish this indocile, undisguisable, and most unsheltered feature had been made a little longer, or a little shorter, or a little wider, or not quite so wide. Or perhaps you wish the isthmus between your eyes a little higher or the ridge of the peninsula a little straighter, or the south cape a little more, or less, obtuse. Or possibly you wish that the front elevation (elevation is good) did not admit, through the natural grottoes above your moustache, so clear a perspective of the interior of Ambition's airy hall—forcing upon you the conviction that your own early disregard of your mother's repeated admonitions against wiping upward, had come home to you at last, and had come to stay. Check that rebellious spirit, I charge you. Your nose is good enough; better, probably, than you deserve; be thankful that you have one of any design at all.
This poor boundary man had none to speak of. And it seemed such a pity. More beautiful, otherwise, than a man's face is justified in being, It was (apart from sex) as if Pygmalion's masterpiece had fallen heavily, face downward, and then sprung into life, minus the feature which will least bear tampering with. The upper half of his nose was represented by an irregular scar, running off toward the left eye, which was dull and opaque; the other was splendid, soft, and luminous. And as he sat in the full light of the lamp, with his elbow on the table, in order to shade with his hand the middle part of his face, the combination of fine frontal development with exquisite and vigorous contour of mouth and chin was so striking that I involuntarily glanced round the hut for the book-shelf.
His lithe, graceful movements had at first led me to mark him down as a mere lad; but now the lamp-light showed a maze of incipient wrinkles on the sunburnt neck, and a few silver threads in the thick, strong, coal-black hair. Moreover, owing to inadvertence or ignorance on the part of people who should have known better, he had been christened in immediate succession to a girl. It is well and widely known that this oversight, small as it looks, will free a man for life from any rude inquiry as to when he is going to burn off the scrub. Alf had no scrub to burn off, except a faint moustache, unnoticeable but for its dark colour. For the rest, he was slightly above medium height and by no means a good stamp of a man—tapering the wrong way, if I might so put it without shocking the double refined reader. And, from stiff serge jumper to German-silver spur, he (Alf, of course) was unbecomingly clean for Saturday. The somewhat
