His schoolmaster, aware of the unusual pursuits which he added to the routine of lessons, gave him as a prize the English translation of a book by Figuier—­The World before the Deluge.  Strongly interested by the illustrations of the volume (fanciful scenes from the successive geologic periods), Godwin at once carried it to his scientific friend.  ‘Deluge?’ growled Mr. Gunnery. ’What deluge? Which deluge?’ But he restrained himself, handed the book coldly back, and began to talk of something else.  All this was highly significant to Godwin, who of course began the perusal of his prize in a suspicious mood.  Nor was he long before he sympathised with Mr Gunnery’s distaste.  Though too young to grasp the arguments at issue, his prejudices were strongly excited by the conventional Theism which pervades Figuier’s work.  Already it was the habit of his mind to associate popular dogma with intellectual shallowness; herein, as at every other point which fell within his scope, he had begun to scorn average people, and to pride himself intensely on views which he found generally condemned.  Day by day he grew into a clearer understanding of the memories bequeathed to him by his father; he began to interpret remarks, details of behaviour, instances of wrath, which, though they had stamped themselves on his recollection, conveyed at the time no precise significance.  The issue was that he hardened himself against the influence of his mother and his aunt, regarding them as in league against the free progress of his education.

As women, again, he despised these relatives.  It is almost impossible for a bright-witted lad born in the lower middle class to escape this stage of development.  The brutally healthy boy contemns the female sex because he sees it incapable of his own athletic sports, but Godwin was one of those upon whose awaking intellect is forced a perception of the brain-defect so general in women when they are taught few of life’s graces and none of its serious concerns,—­their paltry prepossessions, their vulgar sequaciousness, their invincible ignorance, their absorption in a petty self.  And especially is this phase of thought to be expected in a boy whose heart blindly nourishes the seeds of poetical passion.  It was Godwin’s sincere belief that he held girls, as girls, in abhorrence.  This meant that he dreaded their personal criticism, and that the spectacle of female beauty sometimes overcame him with a despair which he could not analyse.  Matrons and elderly unmarried women were truly the objects of his disdain; in them he saw nothing but their shortcomings.  Towards his mother he was conscious of no tenderness; of as little towards his sister, who often censured him with trenchant tongue; as for his aunt, whose admiration of him was modified by reticences, he could never be at ease in her company, so strong a dislike had he for her look, her voice, her ways of speech.