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.

My monstrous conceit of elevation will not suffer condensation into sentences.  What I can testify to is, that for making you bless the legs you stand on, a knockdown blow is a specific.  I had it before I knew that a hand was up.  I should have fancied that I had run athwart a tree, but for the recollection, as I was reeling to the ground, of a hulk of a fellow suddenly fronting me, and he did not hesitate with his fist.  I went over and over into a heathery hollow.  The wind sang shrill through the furzes; nothing was visible but black clumps, black cloud.  Astonished though I was, and shaken, it flashed through me that this was not the attack of a highwayman.  He calls upon you to stand and deliver:  it is a foe that hits without warning.  The blow took me on the forehead, and might have been worse.  Not seeing the enemy, curiosity was almost as strong in me as anger; but reflecting that I had injured no