There was nothing much to distinguish him from any other able man of his rank.

His neighbours felt him to 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.