Eliot opens this chapter, like several preceding ones, with a general statement followed by an example. Previously the method has been used to put across points important to the meaning of the novel. Here it has a lighter purpose, the introduction of Nancy Lammeter.
Nancy is certainly as beautiful as Godfrey's musings have indicated. The point is reinforced by showing how the Miss Gunns react to her. The Miss Gunns are strangers, rather plain young women but members of a more fashionable set. They are the sort of people who have no reason to admire Nancy and every reason not to. Therefore their pleasure in her leaves the reader with the certainty that Nancy is charming as well as beautiful. The Miss Gunns can see nothing to criticize except her hands, "which bore the traces of butter-making, cheese-crushing, and even still coarser work." They pity her ignorance, for she says "’appen" for "perhaps," and "oss" for "horse." They themselves, it is noted with fine irony, "habitually said 'orse, even in domestic privacy and only said 'appen on the right occasions." Thus the Miss Gunns themselves judge by a standard that author and reader find crude. But Eliot displays sympathy and understanding once again: she addresses the reader directly to point out that while Nancy is uneducated, "yet she had the essential attributes of a lady — high veracity, delicate honour in her dealings, deference to others, and refined personal habits — and lest these should not suffice to convince grammatical fair ones that her feelings can at all resemble theirs, I will add that she was slightly proud and exacting, and as constant in her affection towards a baseless opinion as towards an erring lover." This last bit of irony is aimed directly at the reader and serves once again to bring the reader's world into that of the book.
