d, 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 stan