oon became exclusively
devoted--such as the systematic study of English poverty, or of the
relation of religion to social life, reforms of the land and of the
Church--overflowed upon Raeburn with a kindling and disturbing force.
Edward Hallin was his gad-fly; and he had no resource, because he loved
his tormentor.

Fundamentally, the two men were widely different. Raeburn was a true son
of his fathers, possessed by natural inheritance of the finer instincts
of aristocratic rule, including a deep contempt for mob-reason and all
the vulgarities of popular rhetoric; steeped, too, in a number of subtle
prejudices, and in a silent but intense pride of family of the nobler
sort. He followed with disquiet and distrust the quick motions and
conclusions of Hallin's intellect. Temperament and the Cambridge
discipline made him a fastidious thinker and a fine scholar; his mind
worked slowly, yet with a delicate precision; and his generally cold
manner was the natural protection of feelings which had never yet,
except in the case of his friendship with Edward Hallin, led him to much
personal happiness.

Hallin left Cambridge after a pass degree to become lecturer on
industrial and economical questions in the northern English towns.
Raeburn stayed on a year longer, found himself third classic and the
winner of a Greek verse prize, and then, sacrificing the idea of a
fellowship, returned to Maxwell Court to be his grandfather's companion
and helper in the work of the estate, his family proposing that, after a
few years' practical experience of the life and occupations of a country
gentleman, he should enter Parliament and make a career in politics.
Since then five or six years had passed, during which he had learned to
know the estate thoroughly, and to take his normal share in the business
and pleasures of the neighbourhood. For the last two years he had been
his grandfather's sole agent, a poor-law guardian and magistrate
besides, and a member of most of the various committees for social and
educational purposes in the county. He was a sufficiently keen sportsman
to save appearances with his class; enjoyed a walk after the partridges
indeed, with a friend or two, as much as most men; and played the host
at the two or three great battues of the year with a propriety which his
grandfather however no longer mistook for enthusiasm. There was nothing
much to distinguish him from any other able man of his rank. His
neighbours felt him t