One could not accuse them of positive faults, for they had no positive qualities, unless it were here and there a leaning to physical fatuity.

Their interests were concerned with the pettiest of local occurrences; their favouritisms and animosities were those of overgrown infants.

They played practical jokes on each other in the open streets; they read the local newspapers to extract the feeblest of gossip; they had a game which they called polities, and which consisted in badging themselves with blue or yellow, according to the choice of their fathers before them; they affected now and then to haunt bar-parlours and billiard-rooms, and made good resolutions when they had smoked or drunk more than their stomachs would support.

If any Dunfield schoolboy exhibited faculties of a kind uncommon in the town, he was despatched to begin life on a more promising scene; those who remained, who became the new generation of business men, of town councillors, of independent electors, were such as could not by any possibility have made a living elsewhere.

Those elders who knew Dunfield best could not point to a single youth of fair endowments who looked forward to remaining in his native place.
The tone of Dunfield society was not high.
No wonder that Emily Hood had her doubts as to the result of study taken up by one of the Cartwrights.