The girl was like a flag-staff on the upper line of heathland.

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.