Certainly its distinctive feature had escaped him altogether.

At the age of twenty-nine he was a man absolutely without tradition.
His father, a partner in a small firm of shipping agents which had not the tradition of a solid, old-fashioned business, had moved in Martin's boyhood from a little semi-detached villa with its flight of front steps in one suburb, to a house in a garden of trees in another.

The boy had been sent to a brand new day-school of excessive size, which gathered its pupils into its class-rooms at nine o'clock in the morning and dispersed them to their homes at four.

No boy was proud that he went to school at St.Eldred's, or was deterred from any meanness by the thought that it was a breach of the school's traditions.

The school meant so many lessons in so many class-rooms, and no more.
Hillyard was the only child.