Yet Oliver too, in spite of himself, liked the lad for the very qualities which were the furthest removed from Oliver’s own—the boyish thoughtlessness, sanguineness and absence of any sense of responsibility, the half-kindly and wholly confiding selfishness which impressed on Harry the rooted belief that the whole world revolved, somehow, round him and Horry, and was in a manner made for their gain or loss; the half-audacious goodwill which made Harry claim, so unhesitatingly and in such a large measure, the goodwill of his fellows. Harry was as free from self-consciousness as he was mercurial, and the summer sun warmed him through and through, without his being ever troubled with a shiver of repulsion, or a groan of obligation, in the view of wrongdoing and retribution on every side. Oliver was tempted to admire as well as to despise, to covet while he condemned, Harry’s monstrous exulting egotism. After the first shock of his sister Fan’s inconsistent secession to Harry Stanhope’s side of the question, Oliver looked on, without surprise, if a little sardonically, and witnessed Harry’s unbounded success in Friarton. For the very Dadds and Polleys, who cherished a deadly distrust to one of themselves that had penetrated to a higher sphere and professed to return to his own, fraternised in a manner with the intruder, called him ‘the right kidney,’ a pleasant young gentleman as ever lived, taking his frolic as he was free to do. Bless you, he could not really let himself down, be he ever so willing. His people and his class would see to that. It was only his way of making fun. He was a gentleman-farmer, like the lord-lieutenant, or as the late Prince Consort had been, though he amused himself with aping the old yeomen. And he had no fad of raising up the middle-class, any more than he had of leaping over the moon. He gave himself no airs of superior wisdom and virtue. It was only that he could make himself happy anywhere, and had an agreeable word to say to everybody; while nobody was such a donkey as to mistake Mr. Stanhope’s manner or presume upon it. Old Dadd laughed loudly at Harry’s pranks, recalling old members of the gentlefolks he had known who drove coaches and made walking tours in sorry disguises for bets. He entertained Harry himself with these reminiscences, to which the lad listened with his usual affability, old Dadd standing hat in hand the while and Harry forgetting to bid the draper cover his head in the mock yeoman’s presence.