o be a personality, but thought him reserved and
difficult; he was respected, but he was not popular like his
grandfather; people speculated as to how he would get on in Parliament,
or whom he was to marry; but, except to the dwellers in Maxwell Court
itself, or of late to the farmers and labourers on the estate, it would
not have mattered much to anybody if he had not been there. Nobody ever
connected any romantic thought with him. There was something in his
strong build, pale but healthy aquiline face, his inconspicuous brown
eyes and hair, which seemed from the beginning to mark him out as the
ordinary earthy dweller in an earthy world.

Nevertheless, these years had been to Aldous Raeburn years marked by an
expansion and deepening of the whole man, such as few are capable of.
Edward Hallin's visits to the Court, the walking tours which brought the
two friends together almost every year in Switzerland or the Highlands,
the course of a full and intimate correspondence, and the various calls
made for public purposes by the enthusiast and pioneer upon the pocket
and social power of the rich man--these things and influences, together,
of course, with the pressure of an environing world, ever more real,
and, on the whole, ever more oppressive, as it was better understood,
had confronted Aldous Raeburn before now with a good many teasing
problems of conduct and experience. His tastes, his sympathies, his
affinities were all with the old order; but the old faiths--economical,
social, religious--were fermenting within him in different stages of
disintegration and reconstruction; and his reserved habit and often
solitary life tended to scrupulosity and over-refinement. His future
career as a landowner and politician was by no means clear to him. One
thing only was clear to him--that to dogmatise about any subject under
heaven, at the present day, more than the immediate practical occasion
absolutely demanded, was the act of an idiot.

So that Aldous Raeburn's moments of reflection had been constantly mixed
with struggle of different kinds. And the particular point of view where
he stood on this September evening had been often associated in his
memory with flashes of self-realisation which were, on the whole, more
of a torment to him than a joy. If he had not been Aldous Raeburn, or
any other person, tied to a particular individuality, with a particular
place and label in the world, the task of the analytic mind, in face of