For several chapters in the book, you don't actually meet Nancy, you hear of her as the girl Godfrey wants to marry. She is presented as the proper, socially respectable partner for him, - the direct opposite to his secret wife Molly. Even simple Squire Cass approves of her. Bearing in mind what we are shown of upper-class attitudes in the upper-class world she belongs to, we feel differently towards her before we meet her in chapter 11.

When we do meet her through her thoughts in chapter 11 we see that she is a gentle, sensitive almost naive girl who's insecure and confused about Godfreys courtship. When you see her through the eyes of the fashionable, town-bred Gunn sisters as a pretty, well mannered and neatly dressed, She disapproves of their low-cut dresses, and they disapprove of her country dialect. Nancy's father unlike Squire Cass is a man who...