Heriot was strolling, cigar in mouth, down one of the diminutive alleys of young fir in this upstart estate.  He affected to be prepossessed by the case between me and Edbury, and would say nothing of his own affairs, save that he meant to try for service in one of the Continental armies; he whose susceptible love for his country was almost a malady.  But he had given himself to women it was Cissy this, Trichy that, and the wiles of a Florence, the spites of an Agatha, duperies, innocent-seemings, witcheries, reptile-tricks of the fairest of women, all through his conversation.  He had so saturated himself with the resources, evasions, and desperate cruising of these light creatures of wind, tide, and tempest, that, like one who has been gazing on the whirligoround, he saw the whole of women running or only waiting for a suitable partner to run the giddy ring to perdition and an atoning pathos.

I cut short one of Heriot’s narratives by telling him that this picking bones of the dish was not to my taste.  He twitted me with turning parson.  I spoke of Kiomi.  Heriot flushed, muttering, ’The little devil!’ with his usual contemplative relish of devilry.  We parted, feeling that severe tension of the old links keeping us together which indicates the lack of new ones:  a point where simple affection must bear the strain of friendship if it can.  Heriot had promised to walk half-way with me to Bulsted, in spite of Lady Maria’s childish fears of some attack on him.  He was now satisfied with a good-bye at the hall-doors, and he talked ostentatiously of a method that he had to bring Edbury up to the mark.  I knew that same loud decreeing talk to be a method on his own behalf of concealing his sensitive resentment at the tone I had adopted:  Lady Maria’s carriage had gone to fetch her husband from a political dinner.  My portmanteau advised me to wait for its return.  Durstan and Riversley were at feud, however, owing to some powerful rude English used toward the proprietor of the former place by the squire; so I thought it better to let one of the grooms shoulder my luggage, and follow him.

The night was dark; he chose the roadway, and I crossed the heath, meeting an exhilarating high wind that made my blood race:  Egoism is not peculiar to any period of life; it is only especially curious in a young man beginning to match himself against his elders, for in him it suffuses the imagination; he is not merely selfishly sentient, or selfishly scheming:  his very conceptions are selfish.  I remember walking at my swiftest pace, blaming everybody I knew for insufficiency, for want of subordination to my interests, for poverty of nature, grossness, blindness to the fine lights shining in me; I blamed the Fates for harassing me, circumstances for not surrounding me with friends worthy of me.  The central ‘I’ resembled the sun of this universe, with the difference that it shrieked for nourishment, instead of dispensing it.