’You have enough to teach you to live respectably, if only you look to the right kind of example.’

There followed a vehement exhortation, now angry, now in strain of natural kindliness.  To this Oliver made only a few brief and muttered replies; when it was all over, he fell asleep.  But Godwin was wakeful for hours.

The next morning he attempted to work for his approaching examination, but with small result.  It had begun to be very doubtful to him whether he should ‘go up’ at all, and this uncertainty involved so great a change in all his prospects that he could not command the mental calm necessary for study.  After dinner he went out with unsettled purpose.  He would gladly have conversed with Mr Gunnery, but the old people were just now on a stay with relatives in Bedfordshire, and their return might be delayed for another week.  Perhaps it behoved him to go and see Mr. Moxey, but he was indisposed to visit the works, and if he went to the house this evening he would encounter the five daughters, who, like all women who did not inspire him with admiration, excited his bashful dislike.  At length he struck off into the country and indulged restless thoughts in places where no one could observe him.

A result of the family’s removal first from London to the farm, and then into Twybridge, was that Godwin had no friends of old standing.  At Greenwich, Nicholas Peak formed no intimacies, nor did a single associate remain to him from the years of his growth and struggle; his wife, until the renewal of intercourse with her sister at Twybridge, had no society whatever beyond her home.  A boy reaps advantage from the half parental kindness of men and women who have watched his growth from infancy; in general it affects him as a steadying influence, keeping before his mind the social bonds to which his behaviour owes allegiance.  The only person whom Godwin regarded with feeling akin to this was Mr. Gunnery, but the geologist found no favour with Mrs. Peak, and thus he involuntarily helped to widen the gap between the young man and his relatives.  Nor had the intimacies of school time supplied Godwin with friendships for the years to come; his Twybridge class-fellows no longer interested him, nor did they care to continue his acquaintance.  One was articled to a solicitor; one was learning the drug-trade in his father’s shop; another had begun to deal in corn; the rest were scattered about England, as students or salary-earners.  The dominion of the commonplace had absorbed them, all and sundry; they were the stuff which destiny uses for its every-day purposes, to keep the world a-rolling.